Pick Your Poison
by middkidash
Summary: In her desperation, Brigitte flees the Happier Times facility with Tyler, and finds herself wondering if the bargain she made for her freedom was worth it. GS2: Unleashed and beyond. Rated M for Language.
1. Chapter 1

_Author's Note:_

_Disclaimer: I do not own the Ginger Snaps movies, nor any of the content or character therewithin._

_Here it is folks—straight from my unsatisfied imagination to your computers—my Tyler/Brigitte fic, if you can even call it that. I'm not a big shipper, but I definitely saw potential in their relationship. Plus, as I said in the author's note for "Comfortable," the ending of Unleashed makes me sad. Brigitte deserves better than to end up in Ghost's basement, even if her only other alternative is a sexually charged road trip with our favorite Happier Times orderly ;) After all, that's what the movie is about—sex and violence and the odd cravings Brigitte struggles with. I'm attempting to explore that a little deeper here. _

_I'm female, so writing from a male PoV isn't particularly easy. I attempted to do Tyler justice, but if anything about his character and dialogue seems way out of place, please tell me. I'd like to make it work._

_I'm also from the US, so please excuse my Canadian geography and conversions to the metric system. I tried. I really did. Online maps and high school algebra only get you so far._

_A few final notes, detailing my version of the Ginger Snaps Universe: (Not everything will agree with what is common knowledge of the movies. I had to tweak some things to make them work.)_

_Bailey Downs is located in suburban British Columbia._

_Happier Times is located about an hour north of Edmonton, Alberta._

_Time line is as follows:_

_October 2000: The events of Ginger Snaps take place._

_Early Spring 2003: The events of Unleashed take place and continue up until the point where Tyler gives Brigitte the first injection in her room. After that it diverges into my storyline._

_I'm using the headings Past and Present—Past indicates flashbacks to the time during which Brigitte is in Happier Times (or before that), while Present indicates time after the escape. Both progress in chronological order from their first sections. _

_Enjoy! And please, please review. I feel like writing this was not a waste of my time, so let me know that reading it was not a waste of yours. Constructive criticism is always appreciated._

_

* * *

_

_Present _

Brigitte leaned her head against the car window, watching the white line along the road stream by in a continuous blur that might have made a normal person's head spin. Every so often there was a gap in the paint, signaling an intersecting road—and Brigitte's mind recorded these chinks in the chain resolutely—eleven, twelve, thirteen—trying to avoid eye contact with her driver. She did not look out the windshield to see where they were going; she merely trained her eyes to the white line, wishing she had thought things through before jumping willingly into a car with Tyler, the oversexed orderly from Happier Times.

He reached over to change the radio station, and didn't bother to ask her opinion until after settling on a grungy ballad rife with guitar solos.

"Is this okay?" he questioned, glancing at the girl he was transporting quickly before refocusing on the road ahead. She did not respond—detailing her preferred musical selections wouldn't have made much of a difference either way.

His fingers tapped the steering wheel along to the drumbeats until the song ended and the news came on. Perking up, Brigitte disengaged from her hypnotic activity to screen for mentions of escapees of any kind. Tyler, however, upon noticing the switch to commentary, hit the search button and let the radio scan for another station with music.

She rolled her eyes as he hummed along with the new song, letting her head bump against the glass before settling back against the window—nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two…

"So…Brigitte…" he finally said, "Where do you want to go?"

"I don't care. Just drive," she muttered. Without removing her gaze from the white line, she added, "As far away as possible."

Tyler sighed, indicating his disapproval, so she clarified her request.

"Look, just get me into Saskatchewan—drive five feet across the province border and leave me in the dust for all I care."

"Brigitte," Tyler said, "that's eighty kilometers. Another hour's drive. I mean, you don't even have money for gas."

"Look, I'll give you whatever the fuck you want—when we get across the border," she spat. "Just drive the fucking car."

Tyler, unused to anyone ordering him around with such contempt, smirked.

"Fine," he said, again eyeing the petite form in his passenger seat, curled against the door as far away from him as she could possibly get, "But don't think I won't take you up on that offer."

He watched her shoulders tense as she turned to look at him for the first time since they had pealed away from the Happier Times facility an hour before. Her hostile response was understandable, given her misplaced words and his willingness to milk them for all they were worth, but her odd eyes, reflecting oncoming headlights most unnaturally, made Tyler nervous. Days ago, the irises had been a sickly sort of green, but now, in the waning light, her glare was almost golden.

As Brigitte turned back to the window, Tyler's confusion dissipated and got lost in a million other thoughts. It wasn't the driving that bothered him—he spent hours cruising around on his days off, letting his mind wander where it would. Nor did her inability to reimburse him for his trouble make any difference. They had made a bargain, fair and square: get her out and she'd find some way to compensate him. Tyler wondered what exactly she would do when confronted with keeping her promise. He had read her wrong before—and her ability to catch him off guard, more than his attraction to her tiny girlish figure, intrigued him. Tyler tried to conjure thoughts of Brigitte, naked and trembling and most importantly, at his mercy, but had difficulty picturing her as anything but the wild-eyed young woman beside him. He settled back into the seat, changing the station again to prepare for another hour of stony silence. The highway was clear for miles ahead, so he pressed his foot to the pedal, going from ninety-five to one-twenty in a few seconds and making it more difficult for his aloof passenger to watch the road pass beneath them.


	2. Chapter 2

_Past_

When he caught Ghost trying to help the new girl, Tyler reneged what he assumed was a very generous offer—no sex, just his fingers grazing her groin as he made use of that "very private" vein, the view to accompany the touch. He held out until Brigitte pled her case at the orderly's station one night, a darker desperation in her manner than any of the others—even the junkie whores who had been in rehab forever and a day—ever displayed. Later he found her in her room looking as if she were ready to rip his head off for even suggesting she smile—but when she laid back to let him get on with his business, she was suddenly small and vulnerable again. He almost felt bad for even suggesting the arrangement—almost. When he rose to leave, Brigitte, pulling up her pants again, didn't bother to watch him go. In fact, he lingered in the doorway as she put the toothbrush in her mouth and let the drug invade her system. Watching as she curled into a fetal ball, writhing with something he couldn't decipher—pain? ecstasy?—he almost reentered the room to make sure she was okay. Ghost, still awake and skipping down the hall towards him prevented that, however, and to avoid any probing questions, Tyler made as if he had been finishing lock ups.

The next few days passed uneventfully. Brigitte shunned the company of the other girls, even nosy Ghost, and kept to her room except when forced into some awkward social situation. Ghost attempted, without success, to infiltrate Brigitte's defenses; none of the others seemed willing to try. Tyler, although he had tried to be charming at first, soon realized his efforts were in vain. Her signals were mixed—sometimes her attraction to him was tangible, sometimes her indifference shocked him. She needed her fix, but as provider, Tyler was completely dispensable after the fact. And as much as that rejection pissed him off—what girl in their right mind would not want to do anything and everything for a guy like him?—Tyler found his thoughts settling on Brigitte increasingly as his shifts at Happier Times came and went.

"She didn't realize her mistake," said Ghost one night as she sat in Tyler's booth, compiling a picture of a strange half-wolf, half-woman creature, "Until it was too late and she had slaughtered them all."

"Who's that?" he had asked, peering at the dark hair and black trainers the girl had added to the picture.

"Brigitte," Ghost replied, smiling as she began to add pools of blood at the woman-wolf's feet.

"You're crazy, kid," he said, "And it's past your bedtime."

"He'll be sorry if he goes to see her. She lurks in her den of darkness, the beast waiting to emerge." Ghost cocked her head, smiled, and wandered off towards the dormitory. He watched her stop and peer through the window to Brigitte's room on the camera, the girl's expression filled with curiosity. Suddenly Ghost skittered away from the door, turning back to frown repeatedly in Tyler's general direction as she walked. Once the girl turned the corner, Tyler rose. He made his way quietly to Brigitte's door and copied Ghost, trying to discern shapes in her darkened room, but all he could see was deep, brooding black.

* * *

If Tyler were superstitious or concerned about Ghost's third-person rants, he might have heeded the girl's warnings and not gone back to see Brigitte. The next night, however, she appeared at his station again, arms folded tight against her body. 

"I'd like you to visit me tonight. Please." she said in a strained whisper. Tyler mentally reviewed the contents of his stash—he still had a few vials of Brigitte's purple drug among the more mundane substances in which he dealt.

"We'll see. I am _very _busy." He smiled as he said this, holding up the magazine he was reading, just to see the grimace on her face at the double entendre. She replied in tones laced with venom, glancing at the other girls passing the station.

"It's exhausting, I'm sure."

Tyler shrugged and flipped the page, lowering his eyes to the text.

"Look…" she began, but he cut her off.

"Don't wait up," he stated, glancing at the security camera as Beth Ann sauntered by, sneering at Brigitte as she passed. "It may be late."

Brigitte frowned.

"Fine."

She made her way back down the hall to her room.

It took him an hour to make a detour to the basement during his rounds, after getting rid of the ever-present Ghost for the night. He checked to make sure the girl hadn't gone searching through his stuff again, but everything seemed in place. Beth Ann was impatient for her allotment of cocaine and copulation when she let him into her room, tugging on his waistband like a giddy schoolgirl.

"Did you miss me?" she asked playfully, but Tyler was suddenly not in the mood for her silly pseudo-affection.

"Of course," he said, smiling, "But I've got other people to see tonight, and you wear me out, baby." Slightly miffed, she took a quarter her normal dose on credit. Tyler felt no remorse as he locked Beth Ann back into her room, relishing the lie. Every girl at Happier Times hovered somewhere within his power-sphere, to do with as he pleased—all except Brigitte. _In time_, Tyler thought, _all in good time_.

He wandered back to Brigitte's room, checking his watch as he arrived at her door—it was already after 1 AM.

He entered quietly, expecting her to jolt at the slightest sound. Instead, she lay shivering on the bed facing away from him, in the throes of a troubled sleep. He moved closer, unsure of whether to wake her with a word or a touch, when her muscles tensed and she flew up in a state of panic, growling and ready to launch from the bed at the intruder.

"Woah, woah! Brigitte, it's just me!" Tyler staggered back towards the door, but her face slackened and she drooped, sinking back onto the bed after the sudden rush of adrenaline.

"Christ. You scared me."

He watched her watching him—the fight against addiction was slowly but surely draining her.

"Withdrawal's hitting you pretty hard, huh?" he asked, wheeling the chair over to the bedside.

"You might say that." Her hands moved to push down the waistband of her pajamas. Tyler, his buried conscience suddenly reemerging from beneath his corrupt pile of deeds, placed his hand over hers on her abdomen, stopping her.

"Tonight's a freebie," he said quietly, "Come on, sit up."

"I didn't think you did freebies." She sounded surprised as she managed to rise, then her words sunk into sarcasm.

"What about 'there must be consequences to our actions or there is no order' and all that bullshit?"

"I didn't figure you'd complain about my change of heart. If that's the case…"

"No, no," said Brigitte, presenting her scarred arm, "I'm not complaining. But I find it hard to believe someone of your…nature…altered your morals so abruptly."

Tyler smiled.

"I'm glad you have such faith in me. I'm not the total asshole you think I am, Brigitte. Although," he added, "Using these tracts so often will only make them worse. They must…" he said, lightly pressing the bruised skin and eliciting a hiss of pain, "…hurt."

"Yeah," she muttered, watching as he tapped the needle, "They're good reminders."

"Of what?"

"My past—my present. It's all been one fucked up mess, and this," she said, gesturing to the horizontal slices along her forearm, "this is just the icing on the proverbial cake."

Tyler might have replied, but reassuring mantras suddenly seemed inappropriate. He injected the monkshood into her vein, trying to be as quick and gentle as possible, although her face indicated little success. Brigitte lay back down, gripping the edge of the bed.

"I can't be here."

"I know, I know, people are gonna die," said Tyler, smirking as he placed the needle back in the bag.

"You don't know," she growled through clenched teeth, "You have no idea."

Tyler got up and wheeled the chair away, turning to see her writhing about just like before, the toothbrush barely keeping her from biting off her own tongue. This time he did cross back to the bed, only to have her wave him away, a wild terror in her eyes.

"Goodnight Brigitte." He obeyed, only allowing his gait to falter for a moment when he heard her stifled scream from behind the locked door.

* * *

He did not see her again until another three days had passed, her appearance increasingly disheveled and strange. Her stringy hair hung limply around her gaunt, hollow-cheeked face and her arms appeared skeletal—she wasn't eating much of the food they brought her, and although Alice had threatened a feeding tube, Brigitte still threw most of her meals in the garbage. Her eyes burned as she stood and waited for verbal acknowledgement. He took his time studying her distressing countenance. 

"Yes?"

"Please," was all she said, catching his eye, before disappearing as abruptly as she had arrived at his station.

Beth Ann, after working off her debt to Tyler's satisfaction two days before, was ready, awaiting him in her room, to do as he pleased again. Young, eager and willing as always, she almost threw a book at him when he told her he'd have to pass.

"Fuck Tyler," she crowed, "I need my stuff. What the hell are you doing anyways?"

"The usual business," he stated, tossing her a full vial of crack.

"You fucking anyone else like you fuck me?" Beth Ann knew he dealt with most of the other girls to varying degrees, but she sat there stroking the capsule, obviously feeling threatened.

"Only you, baby." He went to the door, rolling his eyes when she couldn't see them.

"That shit's potent—make it last," instructed Tyler, before slipping back into the corridor.

He found Brigitte crouched on her windowsill, watching the distorted shape of the full moon from behind the double glass panes. She was whispering something, but whether she was merely thinking outloud or speaking to herself was unclear.

Tyler cleared his throat.

"I need a bigger dose." She slid down from her perch. She wasn't shivering, but her movements seemed carefully controlled as she stated this from the other side of the bed. Taking his customary seat, he patted the mattress next to him, but she made no move to comply.

"I don't think you can handle what you're getting now," said Tyler, taking out the vial full of purple liquid, "You've OD-ed before, and that's what landed you in here."

"Among other things," she murmured.

Tyler reached out and helped her onto the bed, where she reclined almost sedately.

"There's no more, is there?" she asked in a whisper.

"There's always more," said Tyler, edging her pants down past her hips. When his fingers grazed her groin, however, she grabbed the hand that held the needle by the wrist.

"Brigitte…"

"Don't fucking lie to me," she snarled, "This is it, isn't it? I cannot be here Tyler…I cannot be here."

"Christ, let go!" Her nails clawed into his unmarred skin, but when he cried out she merely dug deeper, her eyes boring into his, demanding any response.

"Alright—yes! There's no more, okay?"

She dropped his hand, which he drew back towards his chest, flexing it. She hadn't drawn blood, just made several gouges in his wrist, around which the skin now stood pink and inflamed.

"Fuck. That hurt."

"Sorry," she mumbled, settling back again to wait.

Tyler hesitated.

"Look, I am sorry. I'm just," Brigitte said, "I don't know what's wrong with me, okay? All I know is I need my stuff, or a few scratches are going to be the least of your problems."

"Are you threatening me?" Tyler slowly rolled the chair out of her reach.

"Yes…no. Okay, maybe. But I do need it. Why else would I be so upset that it'll be gone after tonight?"

"I guess I'm the one that should be sorry," he said, flicking the needle for good measure before finding the vein.

Tyler took no pleasure in injecting Brigitte this time, although he noticed her hair had started to grow back thick and bushy where a week ago it had been smooth. Access to a razor would likely never be one of Brigitte's privileges, considering the scars that lined her arms, although Tyler figured he could always offer to shave her legs, among other body parts. The fuzz on her abdomen helped reassure Tyler that Brigitte was real, not some apparition from one of his weirder fantasies. He couldn't help but run his fingertips up to her belly button, feeling the taut muscles beneath the skin. She made no immediate move to repel his touch, so he let his fingers travel up and underneath her shirt.

_After clawing the shit out of my hand, she owes me,_ he thought.

Her breathing started getting choppy as the drug invaded her system, prompting her to stop his roaming hand just short of her breasts.

"You should've done your exploring before you gave me the monkshood," she said, and reluctantly he helped her get her pajamas back up around her waist as she grabbed the old toothbrush from her bedside table.

"Next time," Tyler said, convinced he could pawn off some other substance on Brigitte to get the taste he craved.

"You know there won't be a next time." She shoved the toothbrush between her teeth. She tried to shoo him away, but Tyler inexplicably remained rooted in the rolling chair, watching her.

"Get out," she managed to growl, but Tyler just shook his head.

"I'm staying put. We're not done here."

Brigitte rolled her eyes in exasperation. She tried to kick the chair away from the bed, but her coordination failed as the drug found its way to her muscles. Tyler, sitting just out of reach, heard a sickening crunch as Brigitte's back arched away from the bed.

"What the…"

The toothbrush had fallen from Brigitte's mouth, and now she was gasping and clenching her teeth alternately, her face red and her eyes bloodshot. Her hands clung and released the covers in spurts and her entire body writhed on the bed.

"This is not..." began Tyler, but at that moment Brigitte's mouth opened wide. From her throat issued a cry unlike anything he had ever heard—a low howl of pain that echoed through the room. Then she gasped again, her limbs slackening, as she slumped into sudden unconsciousness.

"Fuck," Tyler muttered, reaching down to place his fingers on her neck, checking her pulse. As he counted the beats they began to slow, and Brigitte began to stir. She gazed up at him confusedly at first, until recognition stole over her paled face.

"Come on," he said, standing, "I'm taking you to the infirmary."

"Fuck you," she said, "It won't do any good. You had your fun, watched me trip, now get out."

"Some fucking trip," Tyler laughed disbelievingly, "Let's go. Come on."

Brigitte lay still. She turned her head to the side, staring out the window, listening to something Tyler could not hear.

"Brigitte, let's..."

Then Tyler noticed the panes of glass. They were shaking in the sashes, rattling almost inaudibly.

"Oh fuck," was all Brigitte could say, before a monstrous grey mass hit the window with a resounding crash.

Brigitte jumped off the bed, and grabbing Tyler's arm, pushed him towards the bathroom. Cringing as the form rammed against the shatterproof glass, Tyler ducked inside. Brigitte forced the stubborn bathroom door closed. Searching for a lock that wasn't there, she hit the door with her fist just as the force struck the window again with renewed strength. She collapsed against the door, tears in her eyes. Tyler cowered unflatteringly behind the sink.

"What the fuck is that? Huh?" Tyler yelled over the increasing cacophony.

Brigitte, pressing her ear to the door, didn't answer.

A howl, long and low and almost identical in nature to the strange sound Brigitte had made moments ago, reached Tyler's ears. Then, just as quickly as it had begun, the banging ceased. The howl, however, hung in the electric air like a haunting melody, refusing banishment from Tyler's minds as all his thoughts danced around it.

"What…what was that?" he asked Brigitte again, not sure if she was ready to give a reply. She looked into his eyes and the unregulated fear shining within her own frightened Tyler almost as much as the attack. He had seen her desperate and guarded and disgusted, but not afraid—sitting there, she clung to her black journal, which she must have plucked from nightstand just before shoving him into the bathroom. The pages were coming loose, and peeking out from between the leaves was a Polaroid of Brigitte and another girl—a red head—staring in defiance at the camera.

Tyler repeated his question a third time.

"Brigitte, what was it?"

Brigitte dipped her head, her fingertip running back and forth along the edge of the photograph.

"The reason," she whispered, "That's the reason I can't be here."

* * *

After fifteen minutes of silence, both inside and outside of the bathroom, Brigitte, clearly shaken up, stated, 

"It went away. You should go check on the others now. It might have scared them."

Tyler didn't argue until he had gotten up and moved to the door. He noticed that Brigitte, who had scooted beneath the sink, her knees folded with her chin resting on them, did not intend to leave the tiny room. There were no shades on the wall encompassing windows around her bed—no way to forget the horrific barrage other than to stay hidden in the bathroom until daylight dissolved the darkness.

"Are you okay?" he asked, and surprisingly Brigitte replied in civil tones.

"Probably never will be again," she said, shaking her head, "But you really should make sure everyone's not freaked out. And check that all the outside doors haven't been battered off their hinges."

"Right."

Tyler, opening the door a few inches, peered at the window where the form had struck. The glass had held despite the force of the attacker's blows, but had streaks of blood smeared across the panes, mingling with the frost that had formed along the seams. He stepped carefully out.

"Can you toss me a pillow?" Brigitte asked, and he complied, watching as she curled into a fetal position on the tiled floor, the pillow beneath her head.

"Please close the door before you leave." It was a simple request, but Tyler couldn't let it rest at that.

"Brigitte," he said, and she shifted her head to look at him, "We're not…This isn't over. I'm coming back, drugs or no drugs."

Brigitte sighed, closing her eyes.

Slowly swinging the door closed, Tyler heard her reply when only a thin sliver of light remained through which to see her tiny form.

"I know," she said, and then the door clicked shut.

Tyler heard the murmur of voices traveling from underneath other doors before he had even locked Brigitte back into her prison. He trod quietly, listening to the whispers.

"I think it came from that new chick's room." That was Koral, the chunky Asian girl—not much to look at but good for the occasional blow job.

"Brigitte? What the hell are they doing in there? I heard the drug dealer go in, like, an hour ago." Winnie—the ditz who, despite the effort he spent procuring her drug of choice and trying to charm her pants off, had never accepted his advances. He had her under his thumb just the same—she was terrified of the male orderlies, so at least some of the shit she spilled in group seemed to be true.

"Stupid bitch. I should've known that's where he was hurrying off to when he threw some fucking crack at me and told me to 'make it last.' She threw me up against the fucking wall two days ago—can you believe that?" And, of course, Beth Ann.

"You probably," said Tyler, loud enough for them all to hear, "Deserved it."

"Hey, Tyler," said Koral, "What was that sound?"

"Something crashed into Brigitte's window—it might have been a jumped-up deer or something."

"No," whispered Winnie, "Not that—what was that weird noise?"

"What noise?"

"The fucking howling," said Beth Ann. She stared dangerously at him through the little window in her door.

"I doubt you're that good a fuck, honey," she sneered, "At least you never made me howl."

"We don't have wolves around here, do we?" Winnie's voice took on a frantic pitch.

"Just calm down, all of you," Tyler ordered. "No Winnie, we do not have wolves around here. And I was not fucking Brigitte, Beth Ann—not that it's any of your goddamn business who I fuck any way." She grimaced, tossed him the middle finger over her shoulder, and then disappeared around the corner.

"Go back to bed, ladies," he said, and waited to hear their sullen footsteps retreating further into their rooms.

He knew the outside doors were double bolted and impossible to break through, but Tyler checked each one just the same. He didn't risk returning his stash to the basement, just opened the steel door for a fraction of a minute to slide the case out of sight, relocking it hurriedly. He considered sliding one of the desks over and in front of the door, but stopped and shook his head as he was about to begin this silly action. The fear in Brigitte's eyes had caught him up for an adrenaline ride, and he hadn't found his way back down yet.

Nevertheless, when he passed her room again minutes later he almost slipped back inside, inquired if he could make her more comfortable on that cold bathroom floor, but it was late and Marcus would be arriving soon to take up his own station down on the long-term care end of the clinic. Tyler's business with Brigitte could wait until the following evening, or so he hoped. Recalling the otherworldly howl that had escaped her mouth, later echoed by the window-bashing mass of grey, Tyler was glad when, at six AM, he found the welcome sun beating down, unobstructed by clouds, upon the stark landscape.


	3. Chapter 3

_Present_

The allotted hour came and went. An accident on the highway had slowed their progress, but signs for the Saskatchewan border began cropping up regularly as they cruised comfortably along at 100 kilometers an hour.

"So, where are you from any way?"

Brigitte turned to regard Tyler, who was tired, apparently, of tapping the steering wheel off the beat and had decided to play twenty questions. She considered her options. At first she had thought Tyler embraced the whole, "don't ask, don't tell mentality" along with all his other clichéd ideas about life. When he had refused to back off after her last dose and the attack that had followed, she realized that most of Tyler's carefully constructed Happier Times persona was an act. He was curious about her—he had gotten her this far. Whether she answered or not made no difference. He would always have more questions.

She rolled down her window and let the cold air refresh her before responding.

"A little hell hole called Bailey Downs."

"Never heard of it."

"That's because, Brigitte said, "Once you escape it, it ceases to exist."

She turned, facing forward in her seat for the first time since they had left the facility. Tyler took her gesture as she intended—a signal that he was allowed to dig deeper.

"Alberta?"

"British Columbia. Couple hours northeast of Vancouver."

"How the hell did you end up here? I mean…"

Brigitte chose the succinct explanation.

"Shit happened at home. I bailed. I went to Calgary first, for about a year and a half, and then hitched up to Edmonton, where they found me."

"How long were you in Edmonton?" he asked, trying to put Brigitte's puzzle pieces together.

"Eight months, to the day. That night I got nervous, skittish—couldn't stay put. I knew something was wrong.

Details from that evening flooded her memory—the shadows in the alleyway morphing into a monstrous grey body, the second dose of monkshood, her sharp intakes of breath as her throat began to swell shut, and the blood—Jeremy's blood, spattered across her face, when she keeled over in the snow. Those details, however, weren't meant for Tyler's ears just yet.

"Then I OD-ed," she concluded, "And wound up at Happier Times."

"You collapsed outside in an alley. I'm surprised you didn't get frostbite."

Brigitte shrugged.

"They found me pretty quickly, I guess. At least that's what Alice said when regaling the details of my 'rescue.' I didn't wake up until I was at the facility, two days later."

Brigitte, becoming bolder, reached over and turned up the radio as the music ended and the DJ announced the latest news stories. The broadcaster droned on through several trivial items, never mentioning a clinic breakout or anything of the sort.

"I don't think anyone's noticed you're gone yet," said Tyler, mockingly nonchalant.

"Seeing as it is the middle of the night, probably not," Brigitte countered, frowning. "Without you there to do your little checks"—here Tyler let out a low, appreciative chuckle—"There's no real way of knowing until morning, when I don't show up for breakfast, or group, or whatever."

"Once you drop me," she added, "If you drive like hell, you should make it back in time to get a couple hours of sleep and go into work tomorrow."

"Yeah, I suppose," Tyler sighed, sounding slightly disappointed at the prospect of returning to work, or perhaps at ditching her in the middle of nowhere. Brigitte could not really tell, but told herself the tone of his voice had nothing to do with her well-being.

"Alice," she said in encouragement, "Will never be the wiser."

Tyler rolled his neck from side to side, working out a kink with an audible crack. He flexed his fingers on the steering wheel.

"Well I hope not. Because if she finds out I sprung one of her most promising cases for long-term placement, I'll be out on my ass faster than you can say, 'Def Leppard.'"

Brigitte, remembering the tattoo on Alice's upper arm, said:

"It was spelled wrong."

"I know—must have been fucked up when she had it done…either that or the artist couldn't spell for shit," Tyler laughed, and then added bemusedly, "I'm surprised you knew that."

Out of the corner of his eye, Brigitte looked affronted.

"Why? I'm not a complete imbecile. I have listened to music before," she spat, getting defensive again despite herself.

"Okay, fair enough," Tyler said, smirking, "But you don't exactly strike me as the type of girl who'd get down and dirty to "'Pour Some Sugar On Me.'"

Brigitte rolled her eyes, thinking of the idiotic girls at the only high school dance Pamela had ever managed to make them to attend—she had been going through one of her annoying super-mom phases, and had volunteered to chaperone. When not gyrating to various boy band pop and eighties hair rock in suggestive manners—their bodies pressed against male counterparts, or each other—they had been standing in little groups, mocking the two sullen girls who sat, clad in black, in a corner. If they had only known the search and destroy material Brigitte and Ginger had come up with that night, Brigitte thought. Pamela, appalled by the state that high school dances had devolved to, did not force the socialization issue again.

Brigitte, the tune reeling in her head, tried to picture herself earning money with nothing but a string bikini, said song, and a stripper pole.

"You got me there," she said, with a shudder.

Tyler looked away from the road for a moment to catch her eye. Brigitte could see the blue of his irises emerging from the darkness of the car interior, the color of a flower her mother used to grow in the yard, of which she knew no name.

"I bet," he said in a silk-smooth voice, "That you're a very good dancer. You've got a nice body under all that bulky clothing—you're just too afraid." She could tell the revolting image had somehow escaped her own mind and lodged in Tyler's brain, where it was anything but nauseating.

Brigitte paid no mind to his teasing, however, as a forest green sign proclaiming, "Saskatchewan Welcomes You" whizzed past the window.

"Doubtful," she said, gazing ahead, where the highway stretched on. It was the end of the line for Tyler, but Brigitte still had many miles to go before she would feel safe again.

"But I guess neither of us will ever find out."

* * *

Tyler continued to drive, telling Brigitte that he would take her into Lloydminster. 

"It's okay," he said, when Brigitte gave a calculating look, wondering how much a few extra miles would cost her, "No extra charge."

Brigitte, tucking errant strands of hair behind her ears, figured it was as good a time as any to complete their transaction.

"Should I blow you now, or wait until you stop the car?" When he did not immediately respond, her hands darted to the drawstring waist of his scrubs.

"Woah. Hold on there, hon."

Tyler pushed her hands away.

"If you're headed in that direction, I suggest you calm down a bit first. I don't want any unfortunate accidents, automobile or otherwise."

_How easy it would be_, Brigitte thought, to walk away from a car crash, with Tyler dead and unable to tell Alice anything that had transpired between them. _Or,_ she contemplated,_ do a little damage, leave him bleeding by the side of the road, take the car and get the fuck outta here._

She _owed_ Tyler, though, in the twisted sort of way with which she was all too familiar. If he hadn't given her the monkshood at regular intervals, she would have been tearing up Happier Times and its many residents days ago. She had hitched for long distances and without mishap before, so giving head seemed a small price to pay for freedom. Brigitte figured she could stomach it, although she feared internally that he would want more than quick gratification. She had only her unstable body, and although Tyler knew nothing of the little lycanthropic consolation prize that went along with the package, she hoped something in her eyes would tell him to go anywhere but there.

The lights illuminated the little town sparkled on the snow covered horizon, and when they passed a sign with the words "Lloydminster ¼ Mile," Tyler slowed his car to a stop on the shoulder.

A wave of unadulterated panic washed over Brigitte. She had tried to convince herself that she was capable of this one thing, that she could push herself to get it over with quickly, but her resolve was quickly faltering in the quiet urgency of the moment. Silently, she cursed herself for being afraid of the man when the monster lurked miles behind them.

"I haven't got anything," she lied—she did have _something_ that she was not ready to give up yet—when Tyler turned to her.

"I've had jobs on and off, but they confiscated what little money was my bag—and any crap worth anything—when they picked me up. I…I don't know how to properly repay you."

Tyler sighed.

"I knew that act of bravado five minutes ago was a farce."

She was becoming careless in her desperation, and now Tyler was finding chinks in the chain link fence she kept around her soul.

"No—no. I said I'd give you whatever you wanted. I keep my word. I just thought you might want, you know, something valuable." Brigitte, wishing he'd let her disappear into the night, fiddled with cuff of her sweater sleeve.

But Tyler had invested too much in this scheme, she knew, to just let her go so easily.

"You don't think sexual gratification is valuable?" he asked.

"I…well," she reasoned, "A half hour from now you won't be able to buy gas with the orgasm from a mediocre blow job."

He gave a short chuckle, staring ahead at a set of approaching headlights. He waited until the car had passed before answering.

"Point taken. I see you intend the word 'mediocre' as a warning."

Brigitte glanced away, frowning.

"I get it—you're inexperienced." He gazed at her, straight-faced and expectant, and concluded, "I don't care."

"I figured as much," said Brigitte quietly.

_So this is what it comes down to_, she thought, _sacrificing my dignity, trading one kind of fear for another. _

"All right Tyler," she said, "Tell me what you'd like me to do."

The corners of Tyler's mouth twitched, clearly suppressing a smile. His eyes traveled down her slender body, lingering in all the inappropriate places.

"I don't want a blow job, Brigitte. No. Too easy." He laughed, letting the inhibited smile emerge and stretch his lips wide. "I think I deserve a little more compensation than that."

"What, then?" asked Brigitte, more afraid of his answer than of the darkness pressing in on the car from all sides.

Tyler responded by adjusting his seat. He pushed the entire thing backwards, leaving ample room between his body and the steering wheel, and then lowered the back so he was reclining comfortably.

"No," he stated, "I think I'd prefer if you'd full out fuck me, right here in the driver's seat."

"Fuck you," Brigitte snarled, then realized her intentions with those exact words made little sense at the moment.

"Yes, exactly," said Tyler, stretching in the seat and crossing his arms above his head.

Brigitte fumbled for an appeal to his better nature.

"Why? You never make the others go that far."

This flimsy statement was probably false in more ways then one—Brigitte doubted Tyler had to make any of the girls _do _anything they didn't already wish to do in the first place.

Tyler surprised her, though. His smile melted, and suddenly he was very serious.

"You're not like the others," he replied. "You're messed up, baby."

Brigitte tried to appear affronted, but the statement was true enough.

"And besides, I'll never see you again. No awkward corridor conversations to dread on your part." Belatedly, he added, "And I want to touch you—I want you to touch me."

His eyes were impenetrable, and so Brigitte could not read the context of that statement within their depths.

Feebly, she tried a last time to escape the car with her pride intact.

"But…"

"But nothing," Tyler spoke, frowning. "We agreed, didn't we Brigitte?"

She returned the grimace.

"What if…what if I refused? Would you rape me?" she asked accusingly.

Tyler's reply was quicker than she expected.

"No," he said, stretching languorously in the seat, "But why the hell would you refuse?"

Brigitte turned away to gaze out into the darkness beyond the car. The request was ridiculous in every aspect—she would infect him, she would hurt him, she would wolf-out and tear him apart on the shoulder of the Trans-Canadian in the dead of night. There was nothing stopping her from leaping out of the car and away towards the town except her lousy sense of honor. He had put his ass on the line to get her out, to help her. She _owed_ him.

She _would_ fuck Tyler. Maybe, she willed, even enjoy it. And then, the beast inside her promised, she would drag him from the car, kill him, and she would drive away—simple as that.

Brigitte didn't want to hurt him, but the beast, free from the monkshood influence, wasn't particularly good at compromising.

Up to this point Ginger had been lurking in the back of Brigitte's brain, but suddenly she appeared in the back seat, poking her head up front.

_Can I watch?_

_The awkward sex or the equally awkward disemboweling?_

_Both. You know, I could probably give you a few pointers._

_Go away Ginger,_ snapped Brigitte.

_Suit yourself_, Ginger cackled, her voice and image fading into the shadows.

"Brigitte," said Tyler heavily, bringing Brigitte back to reality, "Do we have a deal?"

Brigitte sighed.

"Yes."

He smiled patiently, and waited for Brigitte to make her move.

Without too much hesitation, Brigitte crawled over the stick shift and straddled Tyler's hips, planting her hands one at a time within the triangles made by his folded arms. He smiled with a sheer wickedness she was sure he had saved for this moment, and craned his neck up to catch her lips with his own, but she jerked her head away.

"Condom?"

Tyler smirked. Lifting his hips off the seat, he reached to retrieve his wallet from his back pocket, giving Brigitte a taste of premature contact that sent a pang of pleasure through her abdomen.

He pulled out a foil packet and handed it to her.

"All yours."

"Couldn't you at least…"

Tyler shook his head.

"Hey baby, you heard me. I'm just along for the ride."

Brigitte, the beast within clawing at her heart, could barely tear open the wrapper; her hands shook. She found herself fighting back tears, but she persisted.

_Why does this all have to be so god-damned difficult?_

_You're not a predator, _said Ginger from her hiding place in Brigitte's mind, _But you can be a killer if you need to be. Tear his throat out, Brigitte. His life means nothing._

_He's an innocent bystander! _Brigitte shouted to her subconscious. _He helped me!_

_Do it, _Ginger growled. _One of you is going to end up on the side of the road, bleeding, before the night is up. Better him than you._

Brigitte, nearly defeated, almost gave up when the package ripped open smoothly along the seam.

Succeeding in extracting the condom, her unsteady hands approached his groin.

But Tyler, who was the picture of patience, had another one of those morality moments when Brigitte least expected it. He reached out and clasped her hands within his own.

"Relax," he murmured. "Let me. Relax."

And without warning he shifted and somehow they were in opposite positions—she suddenly beneath him in the driver's seat, he above her, blocking what little light the moon had provided. His vision of her tiny and vulnerable realized, Tyler had to smile again, although Brigitte could see little of his face in the shadow.

He set the condom aside for the moment and instead stripped off both his scrub shirt and wife-beater at the same time, revealing his seemingly hairless, yet nicely sculpted chest.

"So you shave," Brigitte said, stabbing at humor blindly, "Well I think that's just great."

Tyler laughed.

"No, the hair's there, just not a lot of it." He grabbed her hand and placed it on his chest, invited her to stroke it. With the as little contact as possible, she felt the skin with her fingertips. There was a blond down, hidden by the dim light. Brigitte almost enjoyed the touch, although every fiber of her being warned her to shrink away while there was still time.

Tyler moved, however, to coax her arms above her head. Grasping the hem of her sweater, he peeled it off, and, pausing only to smooth her hair back into place, went for her tee shirt as well.

"Now we're getting somewhere," he whispered, nuzzling a kiss on her throat and tossing both tops to the side.

_This doesn't have to be horrible,_ Brigitte thought. _Not this part, with him. But after…after the tempest comes the real storm. _She struggled with images of desire and destruction as Tyler hovered, no hallucination, above her.

He straightened, fiddling with the button of her jeans, when an invasion of light into the car interior made him freeze.

"Shit," he groaned.

Brigitte sat up with haste, clasping her discarded sweater over her bare chest. Tyler wrapped one arm around her, pulling her closer. The touch sent her mind flying in several different directions despite the threat lingering outside their strange little sanctuary.

"I think it's a cop. Just follow my lead."

Seconds later, there was a loud rapping on the window.

Tyler cranked it down to reveal a local police officer, his flashlight leaving them temporarily blinded with light. The cold winter air rushed past the glass in a draft and made Brigitte lean into Tyler's embrace, tightening her grip on the sweater.

"What seems to be the problem, officer?" Tyler questioned, in a remarkably innocent tone. He might have pulled it off, Brigitte thought, if he was not shirtless and clutching a half-naked woman in the front seat of his car.

"Everything all right here?" the officer asked, glancing at Brigitte, who looked away in shame. He was an older man, probably her dad's age, with a weary facial expression and a rotund beer belly. He seemed more irritated by their state of undress than concerned for anyone's safety.

"We just got a little anxious to get home and into bed, didn't we sugar?" Tyler purred, stroking Brigitte's bare back. When she did not agree he gave an almost imperceptible jerk of the head, causing her to stutter a response.

"Mm hmmm, I…we're just…we just got married," she said.

Tyler beamed at his "bride", but his eyes were calling her an idiot.

"Oh, where's your ring?" asked the officer, looking closer at Brigitte than she would have liked. Tyler, whose assessments Brigitte could tolerate, seemed to sense her discomfort and threw his other arm around her, as well.

"Well…" she began, but Tyler cut her off.

"We eloped last night. Very spur of the moment. We're just so in love, but we couldn't afford the rings. We just want to be together."

He kissed her forehead for emphasis, and Brigitte reluctantly displayed an uncomfortable smile.

"How romantic," the officer said, frowning and rolling his eyes in an exaggerated manner. He flashed his light around the car interior, regarding the bags tossed in the backseat with little interest.

"I guess I can let you off with a warning, but you folks need to move along. Where are you heading?"

"North Battleford."

"Wouldn't you know," laughed the officer, "I've got to drive over to Lashburn. Why don't I follow you, and make sure you don't get lost?"

"That'd be fine, sir," Tyler said, still smiling. The man nodded and swung his flashlight away, leaving them to redress in the darkness.

"Fuck." Tyler groped for his shirt.

"What...what are you going to do?" asked Brigitte when she had crawled unceremoniously back to the passenger seat.

"Drive to Lashburn. Hope he doesn't follow us any farther. Then I'll leave you at the nearest motel, turn right around and take back roads. I should make it back to Happier Times just in time to discover your disappearance."

She nodded, although Tyler was no longer looking at her. Starting the car, he pulled out into the lane with the cop close behind. Brigitte curled against her door again, but kept her gaze inward. She watched his eyes on the road, his hands on the wheel, and studied his profile silhouetted against the murk beyond the window.

_Maybe_, she thought, _we'll both make it out of this alive, after all._


	4. Chapter 4

_Past_

Tyler formulated the escape plan all on his own, to Brigitte's simultaneous surprise and chagrin. Trusting him irritated her after their previous encounters, but Brigitte was not in a position to decline his assistance—any assistance for that matter. For two nights she did not sleep, her mind a spinning blur that would not let her rest. All she could think about was the impending exit from the asylum—the restoration of her freedom. Tyler assured her everything was under control, that he might be able to get another vial of monkshood from Alice, who he had last seen gazing at one in the winter light as if trying to decode it. As long as she was able to take something before the symptoms began to manifest themselves on her being, Brigitte would be okay. She had had scares—close calls, near-transformations—before, and up until this point there had been nothing or no one preventing her from recovering and carrying on, alone.

* * *

The first few months after Ginger's death had been difficult, but with time, Brigitte grew stronger and able to take care of herself in the hostile world outside Bailey Downs. She often thought back to how she and her sister were so desperate to get out of their little suburban hell, unaware that a grander hell awaited them. She had gone first to Calgary, burying herself in the slum-like motels of the large Albertan city with a huge supply of monkshood ready for the manufacturing. She bought new clothes with the last of her money stash, and then to throw off anyone who might be looking for her, she shaved her head. The disguise was effective—most people either avoided looking at her or gawked in sympathy—their gazes said "Cancer" but Brigitte knew her affliction was worse. 

She worked nights, waitressing for wages under the table, mostly in crappy diners that didn't give a shit who they employed, never staying for more than a month or two before moving on to the next place, and the next. Holing up in her room for most of the day, she had seen her mother's face for the last time on the local news, as Pamela Fitzgerald was arrested for the murder of Trina Sinclair, the drug-dealer Sam and her own sixteen-year-old daughter. Brigitte's father pled for the safe return of his second child, but after a year and a half with no leads, Brigitte, pronounced legally dead, was suddenly free to move on completely, to distance herself as much as possible from her parents and Ginger and despicable Bailey Downs.

She hitched a ride up to Edmonton, where it was still city but the air was cleaner, somehow. By then her hair had come back, darker than before, and she had grown accustomed to low-rise jeans and tight tee-shirts. She found a craft store where the employees stared at her a little strangely when she hauled off shopping bags full of potent purple flower stalks, but never asked questions. There was a tolerable hotel—where the maids failed to take interest in the little vials lining the shelves of her fridge—in which she stayed, subsisting as well as she could hope. The hotel sat conveniently near the public library, and so Brigitte spent hours researching lycanthropy in its ancient forms—lovesickness, melancholy, an imbalance of the humours of the body—and as much biology as she could process. She had not skipped a grade for nothing, she often reminded herself, but sometimes it all became too complex.

_You're problem is real, _Sam had said, _The solution is real_.

The missing link in that reactionary chain was, Brigitte found not long after she had blown out of Bailey Downs, that the monkshood was not a cure after all. It slowed the transformation, but forget a dose and she was liable to lie in wait behind a bookshelf to tear off the head of that irritating librarian guy who insisted on a one-sided flirtation every time their paths crossed. Studying fervently, she figured her best hope laid in a straight extract of wolfsbane, the stronger cousin of her poison. It was a deadly gamble, of course, but at that point, Brigitte had nothing to lose.

She scoured the greenhouses in the area, looking for someone who kept the poisonous alpine plant, but the various proprietors told her repeatedly how rare wolfsbane itself was, not to mention its seeds, and how difficult it was to grow. Brigitte knew unless she settled somewhere and attempted to locate seeds and grow some herself, an end to her madness was questionable at the most.

Therefore, she had settled—sort of—in Edmonton, where the northern air freed her senses and made her a bit reckless. She found a job, made enough money to support her habit and feed on something besides restaurant scraps for a change. She paid her hotel rent in advance. And she began storing stuff in the drawers of the banged up bureau—that gesture, it seemed, had cemented it.

Everyday actions had taken on an almost "normal" significance when, six months into her attempt at permanence, the beast found her.

Brigitte figured it had been following the smell of garbage into the city limits, and then had decided her scent was much more alluring than that of any meal. Whenever he came calling at her hotel door, the transformation went into overdrive, and it took stepping up her dose by another half vial and a minor anaphylactic shock to keep the symptoms at bay. The neighbors started to complain about strange howling. The hotel manager billed her for inexplicable damage—in the form of claw marks—to her door. And so because of the beast she had to tear up roots again, leave work unexplained, abandon a month's rent, dig out that despicable duffle bag and pack her life back inside.

Brigitte refused to leave Edmonton, though. A lycanthrope with a little lovin' on his mind would not keep her from living—any life was fine, as long as it was not one spent on the run. A roof over her head, something to eat once in awhile, and most importantly, access to her drug—these requests were all she asked of the world, but it seemed the world had chosen to turn its broad back on Brigitte Fitzgerald, intent on watching the disease with which she had willingly inflicted herself slowly destroy her from inside out.

Most of the time she looked ill, making "the librarian guy's" attraction to her sylph-like form even more confusing. She managed to hide the scars on her arms with sweatshirts and jackets, but occasionally her sleeves would ride up and she would find someone staring at the parallel marks in horror. Dark circles perpetually graced her green eyes—swamp-eyes that some lighting tended to turn golden—and her hair was often lank and wig-like against her ivory skin. _Once upon a time_, she told herself, _my aversion to sunlight would have been a winning feature. Now people look at me like I'm a ghost._

_You are a ghost_, Ginger had said, appearing in one of her riskier ensembles, her own hair the lush auburn of a past life, her eyes cornflower blue.

_Your heart's still beating, but you might as well be dead._

Like so many other times, Brigitte had told her sister's apparition to fuck off, but how could Brigitte silence herself? She was smart enough to know Ginger's voice was part of her subconscious—that no one else would be able to see the redhead slinking around if he or she tried to look. Nevertheless, Brigitte had become dependent on making decisions with her dead sister's input, whether she wanted it or not. Banishing the apparition to the back of her mind required some effort, while indulging Ginger cost Brigitte nothing, except maybe her sanity.

* * *

Things had taken a turn for the worse once again early that February. Brigitte had traversed the city several times in the past month and was not able to stay anywhere longer than a few days. In defiance, she insisted on unpacking her things each time, but the beast found her despite the hundreds of thousands of other scents in the city. She was the one he was after, and no amount of her shifting around seemed to confuse the idea of mating out of him. 

_There must be a cure_, _or otherwise there'd be a lot more of them_.

As much as she hated to admit it, Brigitte had begun to doubt Sam's logic. Could there be people out there like her, struggling with lycanthropy like a typical junkie struggled with their habit? Brigitte hoped to hell if such a statement was true, that these fellow sufferers were few and far between. She wouldn't wish her pain on anyone, even Trina Sinclair, who now rotted in her grave…as did Sam…as did Ginger—all victims, directly or indirectly, of the same affliction.

Brigitte refused to believe she was next.

February 21st had begun like most of Brigitte's other days—at dawn, when she woke, shivering, in her hotel room. In her dreaming state, she had thrown the bedclothes to the floor, and it did not take long for her thin frame to chill. As she rose, grumbling, to retrieve the blankets, she checked the clock. 6:22 AM. She had been hiding at the same hotel she had inhabited before the beast's intrusion on her life, near her favorite library, for three days.

Already the air around her was pregnant with threat. Usually he found her after two, her pheromones betraying her location like a red flag on her hotel door.

She bathed, shaved, made another mark on her skin and bound it resolutely. Maybe he had finally gotten tired of her ability to elude him.

Then, just to be sure, she dosed.

That day was an "out" day, Brigitte decided when the dizziness had disappeared, despite the below-zero temperatures outside. She would go to the pawnshop first and hock her last piece of jewelry. There was a silver locket—given by Pamela when Brigitte turned thirteen—that she wouldn't wear then—it had flowers and hearts liberally engraved on it—and that she couldn't wear now, because the metal against her skin made her sick to her stomach. It was sterling, and Brigitte knew it was worth more to her in a pawnshop display case than hidden among her meager belongings.

Walking briskly, her exhalations dancing in the cold air, she had become familiar enough with that particular part of Edmonton to find the store after only one wrong turn. The dingy exterior could not betray the wealth of items Old Eddie, as his patrons knew the shopkeeper, held inside. Brigitte couldn't help but eye the expensive cameras displayed in a case below Old Eddie's negotiating counter. Photography had once been her quirky obsession, and now she passed through the world barely observing the souls shuffling alongside her.

"Ah, Bonjour Miss," Eddie said, the traces of a French accent lingering on his words. Eddie, it turned out, was short for Edouard—he had come from Quebec early in his twenties, married, lost his mill job, lost his wife to cancer, and nearly lost the pawnshop a few times. He lived in the apartment upstairs, and insisted on telling his story to most customers. Luckily, he had yet to rehash the dramatic details of his existence to Brigitte, who knew that one telling was often one too many with most stories. He was polite with her though, unlike when dealing with the young men who came in with stolen goods, even if what she tried to sell was crap.

He took his time examining the necklace, running his callused thumbs over the engraved case that had never held a picture, testing the strength of the chain with a few tugs.

"I do not see a .925," he said. Brigitte, who had looked up grades of silver several days before in a different part of town, was ready for this.

"I'll show you," she said, turning the case on its side. Near the hinged seam, the crafter had stamped a faint ".925" almost too small to discern. Eddie broke out his coke-bottle lens glasses, squinting at the tiny print.

"Ah, oui. C'est ici. Neuf cents vingt cinq. Okay, ma chère. This is a nice piece."

Brigitte waited for Eddie's offer, feeling hopeful despite herself. Eddie was known to be incredibly generous on certain occasions.

"I'll give you twenty-five."

But mostly Eddie was a cheap old bastard. Brigitte knew the locket had cost her mother over $100 new. She decided haggling was her only option.

"Sixty."

"You must be joking with me, ma chère."

Brigitte frowned.

"But…" continued Eddie, "It holds some sentimental value, no?"

_No_, thought Brigitte,_ it doesn't. _At least that was what she had told herself all that dawn, when removing it from its hiding place—a pocket she had sewn in the lining of her jacket. _For emergencies only_, she had thought when tying off the white thread against the black material, and now she could not remember what her definition of "emergency" had once been.

"Yes," she answered belatedly, her gaze on the locket for dramatic effect, "It was my mother's. She died of…" Here she paused, recalling just in time the disease that had dispatched Mrs. Old Eddie, "She died of Hodgkin's disease. A year after she gave me this."

Brigitte, over the past two years, had become an increasingly convincing liar—an ability she had once despised in Ginger, that she now hated about herself. She could practically hear the tugs on Eddie's heartstrings, and silently chided herself for reminding the old man of his losses when hers were not genuine.

"Oui, oui, well," he said, after losing his gaze in the glass of the countertop for a significant moment, "This will not do, then. I will give you forty, but no more."

But Brigitte _had_ lost a great deal—a home, a family, a devoted sister whose presence she ached for. Suddenly forty dollars was not nearly enough—not to make up for those things, not for one of the last connections she had to her former life.

_Almost two and a half years,_ Brigitte thought_, and I've been lying to myself the entire time. If I let go of it all, I'll have nothing left. _

As the old man moved to tuck the necklace away for safekeeping, she snagged the chain in her fingers.

"I…I changed my mind," she said, pulling the locket out of his reach, slipping it back into her coat pocket. She still had enough cash to manage for another week.

"Ah, je comprend, ma chère." The old man's smiled back kindly, folding his hands on the counter, "Keep it a little longer. Maybe you will not have to sell it after all?"

Brigitte nodded, retreating to the door. Eddie followed her, standing in the doorway and watching her slowly start down the sidewalk.

"Bon chance, ma chère," he called after her. "And I hope that I will not have to see you again so soon?"

"I'll keep my fingers crossed," she replied, the necklace making her queasy even though a wool mitten lay between her palm and the cool metal.

It was a weakness she could not erase, Brigitte mused, the longing for the time before the transformation. Perhaps if she held onto this one trinket, her weakness would remain hidden within her hardened heart.

Eddie smiled again and held up his hands, the index and middle fingers entwined on each. Brigitte, however, was too experienced to ignore the sadness in his eyes.

* * *

She spent the remainder of the day wandered aimlessly around the mall, where she both looked and felt out of place among all the scantily clad teenage shoppers, who strolled, one arm hooked through the arm of a companion, the other cradling a puffy parka or sleek pea coat. She went into a few stores and browsed the clearance sections, where everything was her size, but much too expensive to think about buying. Thrift shops had always been more her fare when she and Ginger were young and attempting to stand out among all their brand name bearing brethren, and she had found a couple good ones hiding on the corners of certain Edmonton streets, where the clothes were almost new and cheap. The items always smelled of their previous owners, but Brigitte could deal with living in _a_ past, as long as it was not her own. 

"Kiki's Krafts" was at the far end of the expanse, sitting boldly between a gag gift store and a comic book shop. Brigitte was a regular customer by this time, but the middle-aged woman who greeted her a little too enthusiastically at the door bore no resemblance to anyone she had dealt with before.

"Oh hello!" piped the proprietor as she manhandled some silk calla lilies in a dusty ceramic vase. She was either new, thought Brigitte, or it had been a particularly slow day.

"Hey," she replied quietly, moving off towards the section of dried flowers, her eyes scanning the rainbow arrangements for the purple pod-like monkshood.

"Lovely day, isn't it?" The saleswoman had snuck up behind her, and Brigitte jumped despite herself.

"Oh I'm sorry dear," she apologized, wringing her age-lined hands, "Is there anything you're looking for? I'll help you find it."

Brigitte sighed.

"My mom sent me in—she needs a certain flower for a craft she's doing—monkshood?"

"Oh dear, dear," said the saleswoman, frowning, "I know we had some a few days ago…" She swept away to the left, where she leaned over and began digging fervently through a trough. Brigitte moved closer cautiously, but the woman did not spring up suddenly with flower stalks as she expected. Instead, she frowned and slowly stood back up.

"I remember now. We had to throw it all out—the monkshood—it was starting to fall apart. Very unusual. Well not really. They are dead flowers, after all. Bound to break down eventually."

The woman tittered nervously at her own joke when Brigitte made no attempt to laugh.

Instead, Brigitte swore under her breath. She only had about ten vials left—time to start manufacturing again.

"Well," she said, looking for an excuse, "My mom only needs the little purple flowers. She's gluing them on a wreath, or something. Cause if you still have them out back I can pay…"

"No, no." The woman sighed. "The garbage collector took them away this morning. But," and here her voice rose hopefully, "We're getting a new shipment in on Thursday! You just tell your mother to send you back then and we'll give you as much as you can carry, ten percent off!"

"Yeah," Brigitte said, thinking ahead. She'd be cutting it close, but she could make it back at the end of the week, given the beast hadn't outsmarted and disposed of her by then.

"Okay, hon?" The saleswoman smiled again cheerfully, only serving to make Brigitte feel sourer.

"Okay," replied Brigitte, affecting a fake enthusiasm she was sure the woman would appreciate. She left the store, her disappointment at the day increasing with each step.

_Maybe I really should cross my fingers_, she mused, cursing her luck and endeavoring to escape the fluorescent lights for somewhere a little less disingenuous, somewhere a little darker.

* * *

Managing to slip by Jeremy was a challenge Brigitte accepted each time she entered the library—one, unfortunately, she had lost more times than won. He seemed to have a sixth sense as to when she could be found lingering in the macabre or medical sections, and never failed to capitalize on a chance to humiliate himself. Of course, his enthusiasm in courting her was endearing. Ginger liked to taunt her about his worship, but Brigitte knew he was just wasting his time. Soon she would have to leave behind her quiet hours in the reading room of the Stanley A. Milner Public Library for those in another. He would probably find her promiscuity with the written word enthralling, but once he glimpsed the scars on her arm Brigitte doubted he would stick around to ask how she got them. 

She was sitting on the floor in an aisle, skimming a bloodletting book for tips to apply to her daily self-mutilation routine, when Jeremy rounded the corner. The stench of attraction rolled off him like a fog, and Brigitte figured she could indulge him one last time.

"I'm on to you." He said this as he leaned on the bookcase, his head resting on his hands, but when she merely looked up and frowned, he grabbed a book from the shelf and began leafing through its contents as he continued his assault.

"You come in here late at night, you stay until all the other avid readers are gone. You're attracted to me, but you fear rejection."

Brigitte suddenly had difficulty keeping a straight face.

"So you bide your time, just kind of waiting for that perfect moment. Don't worry—I've been dealing with this all my life."

_Time to go_, thought Brigitte, snapping her book shut.

"I'm kidding," he offered, but she gave a tight half-smile and rose. As she pushed past him, she pointed out the fact that his fly was open.

_Search and destroy_, whispered Ginger, and Brigitte could not help but smile genuinely when no one could see her face.

When she made it to the checkout counter—Jeremy on her heels like a smitten schoolboy—he informed her that she had an overdue account.

_Shit_, she thought, remembering several books she had left behind months ago, their contents of no further use to her, when first fleeing the beast.

He had already launched into an apologetic spiel about how he would let it go "this time," when Brigitte slung her bag over her shoulder and made for the exit. She heard his resigned remark as the heavy door swung shut behind her, but her thoughts had already traveled elsewhere.

Nothing had gone right that day, and now that darkness had descended on the city, Brigitte felt the fear rising in her chest.

It had been three days since her last move.

_One too many. Something is definitely not right. _

She had to get out of there—truly out. As attached as she had become to the dregs of Edmonton, it was time to say goodbye.

And then, as she passed an alleyway veiled in shadow, she stopped and peered into the black.

Whether she imagined the shufflings, the throaty growls, the canine face emerging into the light, Brigitte could not tell.

It took all her self-control to keep from running the six blocks back to the hotel.

Bursting into the room and then locking the door behind her, Brigitte sat down at the desk. She unwound her current bandage from her scarred arm to find that the cut she had made that morning had already healed completely.

_You're healing faster, aren't you?_ Ginger's voice slithered through Brigitte's mind like a snake. _That shit's not a cure, you know. It just slows the transformation. _

_I know all this Ginger, so would you please shut the fuck up! _Brigitte screamed back silently. Ginger's voice slid away for a moment, but returned as soon as Brigitte had risen from the chair and made for the refrigerator.

_It doesn't stop it B. _Ginger said this almost sadly, and then amended her statement.

_Nothing will stop it._

But Brigitte knew that wasn't true. She had survived the disease for years when Ginger had barely lasted a month. She had the willpower to stop the transformation in its tracks, thanks to the drug and the hardening of her heart.

Extracting a vial from the cool interior of the fridge, Brigitte picked up an empty needle and jabbed it through the rubber top.

Ginger, refusing to disappear this time, stood at the edge of the bed, a semi-concerned look on her face.

_What're you doing? You already dosed today._

Brigitte ignored her sister. Shooting up demanded all her attention. Once she had tied on the latex tubing, she positioned the needle along her bruised forearm, seeking the vein with the tip in a painfully urgent manner. Succeeding, finally, in sliding the needle under her skin, she pressed the pump with her thumb and flooded her system with the purple drug.

She had never done two full doses in twenty-four hours before, and as she sank onto the bed, the toothbrush clenched between her teeth, she realized it might have been a mistake. Monkshood was _poison_, after all, and despite her developed tolerance, there was always a chance she could die.

Ginger was lying on the bed behind her, going on about a game they used to play as children. Brigitte remembered watching her sister's face turn purple as Ginger held her nose and mouth closed, her eyes finally spiraling back into her head as she drifted into unconsciousness. Brigitte, afraid for Ginger's life, would call in her mother, and then Ginger, upon revival, would sulk the rest of the day and ignore Brigitte as Brigitte now ignored her.

_That game really did suck_, thought Brigitte, _but she kept insisting that we play it, even after getting in trouble for the millionth time_. Ginger had always been funny like that—tell her to stop doing something and she'd try it again and again just to spite someone.

And Brigitte would do anything her older sister did, even if it meant sacrificing herself.

The toothbrush still in her mouth, Brigitte had a crawling urge to go look out the window. She drew back the curtain.

_Can you feel it? _Ginger asked quietly, standing a distance behind her.

The sparse, snow covered parking lot was deserted, but Brigitte could hear things a true human being could not. Hidden among the sounds of cars on the street lingered a heavy panting, and the sound of claws clicking on the blacktop. She knew how he maneuvered from shadow to shadow, how he would have saved his strength all day in order to assault the door.

And Brigitte knew, this time, he would be successful.

Ginger, suddenly leaning over her shoulder, whispered in her ear.

_You're not alone._

In seconds, Brigitte had extracted her duffel bag from under the bed and shoved in her few articles of clothing, her journal. Reopening the fridge, she pulled all the vials of monkshood towards her. They fell with clinks into the bag, along with her needles and other apparatus. She left most of it on the dresser, though. Let the landlord figure out what had been going on here—let him try to understand the girl fleeing through the streets in the wake of the beast.

But there was a problem she couldn't have seen coming. When she pried upon the door, her bag slung over her shoulder, Jeremy was standing outside.

_The fucking librarian guy_, Ginger spat, and then retreated.

"This is technically a breach of library policy," he said, oblivious to the danger he had stumbled into, "but I brought you the books." He smiled in his self-conscious way.

It took him several seconds to connect Brigitte's labored breathing and wild eyes to the needle still sticking upright from where it had lodged in the carpet.

"Are you okay?" he asked, and Brigitte provided an answer by stumbling forward into his arms.

"What did you take?" He escorted her through the snow to his running car, muttering, "I'm going to get you some help, okay?"

When she sat secure in the car, still hyperventilating, he entered from the driver's side, leaning over to buckle her seat belt.

"Okay, I'm gonna get you some help…"

Brigitte saw what would happen before it did, and as a result the scream escaped her throat before the wolf smashed in the glass, latching onto Jeremy's shoulder with massive jaws. The vocalizations of his distress soon eclipsed hers as the blood from his wounds flew through the air and onto Brigitte's pale face.

How she managed to get the belt unbuckled with her shaking hands Brigitte didn't know, but she escaped the car intact, dragging her bag behind her across the parking lot, the sounds of the werewolf tearing apart her rescuer piece by piece echoing in her ears.

She stumbled along, fell once, thinking only of getting away—getting as far away as possible, getting somewhere warm…anywhere but that moment in her life.

The streetlights dimmed as she staggered towards her destination, and her vision began to cloud around the edges. She could smell the blood…Jeremy's blood…on her face, on her hands and knew it was her fault he had died…was still dying, in excruciating pain.

Everyone her diseased being left an imprint on would die, until she gave in to the beasts or committed suicide—the one within and the one without, their mirrored destruction of her finally complete.

Brigitte could not move forward any more—she could not breathe. She fell, face first into the snow, still clutching her bag and her toothbrush. Her eyes closed for what she fleetingly thought would be the last time.

She fell into black oblivion quickly, but Brigitte knew now that she _was_ the darkness.

She had been all along.


	5. Chapter 5

_Present_

The police officer followed them for twenty minutes before turning off onto a side road just outside of the Lashburn town center. Tyler breathed a sigh of relief when the tailing car's headlights flashed in warning, and then were lost in the darkness to the left.

"So where'd you say that turn off was?"

Brigitte had Tyler's much-used atlas splayed out on the dashboard. She dragged her fingertip across the Saskatchewan map to a tiny line extending southeast from Highway 16.

"It's just on the other side of town, like a half-mile."

In a matter of minutes, they cruised through the miniscule town. Cornfields and the rare copse of trees surrounded the car again.

"There it is," Brigitte said, jerking her head towards the right, where not far from the intersection a fading neon sign of the hotel flashed brilliant in the car's headlights.

Tyler's gaze stole to the radio clock. They had left the clinic after 1 o'clock, and it was going on 4 AM. He had to be back at work by eight to replace Marcus. Brigitte too, glanced at the glowing green digital readout.

"These idiots better have all night check-in," she muttered, reaching into the back for her duffel bag.

"How're you going to get a room if you don't have any money? Offer them what you offered me?"

Tyler threw the comment out nonchalantly, but he knew he had struck a chord. She scowled back at him.

"I'll manage."

Tyler rolled his eyes, but he had no doubt in her resourcefulness.

As he pulled into the parking lot of the motel, Tyler struggled with the wheel. The car careened through several deep ruts, jostling both driver and passenger.

"Doesn't look like this place has been plowed in awhile," he commented sarcastically, jerking to a stop in front of the office. He unbuckled his seatbelt, fully prepared to get out and escort her to the door, but Brigitte had other plans.

"Thanks for everything," she muttered, all bargains forgotten in her eagerness to escape. Throwing off her own shoulder harness, she dinged the window with the metal buckle. Then she scrambled out of the car so quickly Tyler barely had time to spit out a disgruntled "You're welcome," before she had vaulted up the steps to the little building's entrance.

_Christ, drive all night, and this is all I get?_ Tyler asked himself, watching her in the rearview.

There were no lights on in the windows, however, and although he could have accepted his losses and driven away any moment, Tyler chose instead to idle and witness frail Brigitte pound the hell out of the door.

She stopped her assault, pressing her ear to the wooden barrier and listening for movement, but even from inside the car Tyler could see her face fall.

_Abandoned._

There wasn't a single car in the lot besides his own, or a single room with light escaping from behind the drawn shades.

He had been dismayed for a moment that Brigitte's repayment would never materialize, but it appeared that the less-than-joyful-ride was not over—not yet.

He pressed his palm to the horn, and Brigitte, reasonably skittish, jumped but refused to look back to the car. She pressed her ear to the door again, but there was obviously no one there for a rude late-night customer to wake.

"Brigitte, come on," Tyler yelled, after cranking down the passenger side window a few inches. "There's no one here."

She stood hunched on the stoop stubbornly, her eyes traveling around, looking for any means of getting out except the convenient one—Tyler's warm car, sitting right in front of her.

"Just go," she replied, "Just go back to your life."

The wind kicked up at that moment, whisking away what she said next, although Tyler thought she might have uttered, "I'll be fine," when clearly she wasn't. Crystals of snow blew viciously into her face, and she turned her head away for a moment, closing her eyes to the winds barrage. The cold flushed her cheeks pink, making her look healthier than Tyler knew she was as she held her insubstantial arms tight around her body. Without a jacket, he reasoned, she would freeze to death before she made it back to Lashburn or onto the next town. Or, whatever the fuck was chasing her would catch up, and then…well, Tyler wasn't sure he wanted to let that scenario play out.

There was no genuine reason to stay beyond receiving his end of the bargain—at least not one he was willing to acknowledge without losing the upper hand—or his sanity. There something about Brigitte—her mannerisms, her dependency, her wild eyes—he could not shake. Just as there was no reason to hang around, there was no particular reason to leave either. He could make up some bullshit story later to tell Alice when he showed up at Happier Times a few days late, to supplement the bullshit story he had already told her when requesting the night off.

If his boss didn't believe him, what was the worst that could happen? Suspension without pay? Alice relied on his persuasive powers too much to fire him outright. Tyler had a brand new piece of plastic shoved in his wallet, courtesy of Visa Canada, and there were _always_ more condoms to replace the one that had become lost somewhere between the border and Lashburn.

Buying a chance to finish what he and Brigitte had begun back at the Saskatchewan border seemed reasonable.

First, however, Tyler had to get her back into the car, and then remind her of just how much she owed him.

"Get in, right now," he ordered, "I'm not leaving you here."

"Why not?" she shouted back, still unmoving, "You were going to leave me on the side of the road back there after I got done fucking you—what's the difference? Here or there?"

Maybe Brigitte, shivering on the doorstep of a deserted motel office, thought she had a point, but Tyler knew she was wrong. He knew this because, in fact, all his remaining notions of handling the situation coldly had dissipated when she had sat, hip to hip with him, struggling with the condom like the shy young woman he knew trembled within her icy exterior. Everything about her intrigued him—her dark hair, her pale skin, her tight mouth—one he wanted to coax to loosen and surrender to his own—and her eyes, golden moon eyes that scared and excited him all in the same moment and reflected the light around her with an eerie glow. If he looked closely enough, Tyler imagined he could see himself drowning placidly in the pools of her eyes.

His growing sympathy and fascination toward Brigitte did not mean, however, that he could not continue to toy with her a little.

"Come on," he growled, choosing not to spill his reflections out loud but to insult her instead, "Stop being such a stubborn bitch and get in the fucking car."

Brigitte's eyes narrowed, offense clearly taken.

_That's it_, thought Tyler, as Brigitte slowly descended back into the snow-clogged drive, _get your crazy little ass over here._

He peeled away with some difficulty the minute she had slammed the door shut.

"I can't just leave you in the middle of nowhere," said Tyler once they were back on the highway.

Brigitte didn't condescend to reiterate her thoughts on the matter.

"There'll be a Super 8, or something, somewhere."

She kept her gaze fixed on the barely visible landscape outside the passenger window. She hadn't rolled it back up—now the air was whooshing in with wind-screams and whipping her hair all over the place. She seemed determined to make the next leg of their journey a hellish one for herself. He could see her struggling to stop her teeth from chattering, and he could see her delicate hands wavering as they rested on her arms.

Checking to make sure the stretch of highway ahead was clear and straight, Tyler kept one hand steady on the wheel as he leaned over her lap, reaching for the crank handle.

She did not even flinch when he loosened his grip and the car drifted slowly into the other lane.

Giving the handle one last shove to make sure the glass had gone home, he straightened back up just in time to see an oncoming vehicle, its headlights flicking maddeningly. He grabbed the wheel with his right hand and gave a quick jerk, sending them back across the road. The other car streamed by, the driver leaning out the window to yell a fleeting obscenity as he passed.

"You got a fucking death wish or something?" Tyler breathed, remembering in that moment to throw his seatbelt back on.

Brigitte made no move to acknowledge that he had spoken.

She was shutting up the windows to her self again, just as Tyler had started to

enjoy the view.

"Oh for Christ's sake—don't start that again," he bellowed without removing his eyes from the road. "And buckle your goddamn belt. Don't tell me I have to do that for you, too?"

In one swift movement, she pulled the restraint across her chest and snapped the buckle into the slot, pursing her lips and keeping her eyes veiled.

"Happy?" she spat, and said no more.

This was as immature as Tyler had ever seen Brigitte act, and it bothered him. She was pouting like a spoiled preteen—like Ghost, for that matter, who was probably back at Happier Times tearing up her comic books in rage because for once she had not discovered Tyler's secret plans—and Tyler wondered for a moment just how old Brigitte was. When he had first seen her, walking confusedly down the hallway with Alice, dragging her IV stand, his guess had been early twenties. College age. Legal. But now, as she continued to snub him, he wasn't so sure.

_Great, _he thought to himself, _I'm probably aiding an underage runaway. Not to mention jailbait. Shit, what the hell was I thinking?_

Sneaking a glimpse at the theretofore unconquerable Brigitte, still glaring resolutely ahead, it did not take him long to remember his reasons for helping her.

It was his flaw, Tyler decided. He'd never been able to resist someone who attempted to resist him. It only made the chase and the victory he knew would come all the more enjoyable.

But the girl sitting silent beside him looked so tired. Tired of his games and her addiction and running and, it seemed, just _living_.

_Look at her_, Tyler thought,_ Struggling to stay awake. How long has it been since she's slept? How long has it been since I've slept?_

"4:20," he muttered, watching his eyes un-focus and readjust on the clock as he blinked. He hadn't been to bed the entire day previous, or the night before when he had pulled a double shift in order to earn the time off he was spending so recklessly now. And they had been on the road for over three hours—three long hours of driving in the dark and watching for deer and anticipating an encounter with Brigitte that had not materialized.

Tyler reached over and turned the radio off, prompting Brigitte to react in the slightest manner. She shifted her crossed arms, and nothing more, but Tyler could tell she had been relying on the radio to keep her alert. He could hold off the drowsiness for awhile longer, but her eyes were already heavy-lidded, the upper lashes kissing those below in more depth as each minute ticked by. Then, finally, her eyes fell shut and stayed that way. Her breathing slowed and her frame relaxed.

The map still lay open on the dash, and Tyler traced 16 to a rest stop just past North Battleford—the perfect place to spend a few hours napping.

Brigitte, slumped back in her seat, her arms loose at her sides in slumber, looked deceivingly peaceful.

_Probably should've taken the blowjob when I had the chance,_ he thought, shaking his head.

Tyler tightened his grip on the wheel and accelerated, hoping to make it to the rest stop before she stirred.

* * *

_Wake up sleepyhead. It's time. _

Brigitte jerked upright.

"Wha…what? Ginger?"

She opened and closed her eyes fitfully in the sunlight, slowly taking in the bright and unfamiliar interior of the car in which she sat.

There was a large spiral bound book tucked in the seat beside her, and two cups of steaming coffee in the holders situated beneath a stereo that was quietly churning out bad rock. There were two bags in the back, one open and spilling seafoam green scrubs onto the seat. The display and dash both lay under a thick coating of dust, and Brigitte sneezed almost instinctively at the thought of the particles hanging in the air. Shaking her head and rubbing her temples, Brigitte focused on the clock readout.

11:39 AM.

Where was she? Who had driven her here, leaving behind a guide to local hotels and a bunch of change on the front seat?

Then a blond guy-next-door type appeared like an apparition at her window, tapping it with his index finger playfully, and Brigitte came to.

Tyler opened her door as she attempted to expel the remainders of sleep from her eyes with the back of her fist.

"You slept like the dead," he laughed. "They had a near accident about a half-hour ago, some idiot in a truck almost backed into a sedan. There was a lot of horn honking, and you didn't even move."

"I…Tyler…what?"

"Let's go for a walk," he said, extending his hand for her to take.

He had changed into street clothes at some point, jeans and a light jacket opened to expose the tee-shirt underneath. The temperature had changed with the introduction of daylight, and the draft from the open door did not bother Brigitte, clothed in only the thin sweater and cords.

"Come on, up and at 'em. You must need to stretch. Not to mention piss like a racehorse. I know I did."

When she hesitated, he reached the extra inch and pulled her bodily from car. She did not have the energy to shrink away from the arm he placed around her shoulders as they stepped up onto the sidewalk and headed towards a building in and out of which people milled continuously.

"Where are we?" she managed to ask after they had moved several feet. There was a big yellow school bus taking up at least ten parking spaces, and two teenagers were leaning on the tail end, trying to hide the smoke from their shared cigarette as three older people—teachers, Brigitte supposed—stood not ten feet away. She nearly missed Tyler's answer to her question as she watched the girls each take a quick drag from the stick, their breaths more substantial in the air than her own. She had pilfered cigarettes on and off since she had been on the move, but she had never smoked out of necessity—only boredom. The craving hit her hard in that strange moment, though, watching people who could have been she and Ginger in an alternate universe, where they kept their oddities tucked beneath mainstream style but felt them just the same—the need to escape, the desire to be anyone but yourself.

"…tired, so I stopped at this rest area. We're about 5 miles outside of North Battleford."

As they passed, one of the smoking girls did a double take at the sight of Tyler, raising her eyebrows in interest and then nudging her peer. Naturally, when Tyler noticed the attention they paid him, he winked and grinned and kept his arm around Brigitte all the same. Only when they had disappeared out of the girls' sight did Brigitte hear each giggle such clichéd comments as, "ohmigod, he's hot," and "what the hell was that thing he had with him? a corpse?"

Brigitte shook off Tyler's grip. Nevertheless, when she tried to step away he grabbed her wrist, applying just enough pressure to indicate he was not about to let her wander off.

Instead, he pretended that she had stumbled.

"What's the matter, Brigitte? Let me help you," he murmured, issuing commands with his eyes that Brigitte dared not disobey in such a public place, with too many witnesses to count.

Keeping his hand clenched around her thin wrist, while simultaneously encircling her waist with his other arm, he guided her into the building and passed people of every shape and size, none of whom glanced twice in their direction, towards the back where the restrooms were.

The handicapped single bathroom was empty, so after taking a surreptitious scan of the nearby area, he gave her a little shove and followed her in, locking the door behind them.

_How very deja-vu of him_, Ginger said, but Brigitte couldn't spot her sister anywhere in the small cubicle. There was just her and Tyler, who had backed her against the wall, but with a bemused smile on his face.

"Look," he began, leaning in, turning her face towards his when she tried to look away, "I've gone out of my way to help you, Brigitte. You're not slipping away into the crowd until I've had my fill of you."

Brigitte almost protested that people would hear them there, in the bathroom, but interrupting Tyler was not an option. He seemed to glean what she was about to say, however, and rolled his eyes.

"Not here. God, no. That would be too weird, even for me." He noted as the muscles of Brigitte's neck loosened, and then dropped the real bomb.

"That is why," he said, nodding, "You and I are going to drive some more, find a hotel room, and complete our transaction. And then I will get in my car and go back to my life, just like you suggested."

He leaned in slightly closer, and with an undistinguishable flare of her nostrils, Brigitte took in his musky scent—sweat and grease and gravel and the sweet smell of cigarette smoke, as if he had been standing with the high school students, sharing their habit, just before Brigitte had woken up. Images of Tyler in various states of undress and demise filtered quickly past her unseeing eyes

_Almost four days since your last dose_, she thought._ Even without the beast's presence, you can't hold out much longer. Your eyes are already gone—and he looks at you too closely not to tell the difference when your ears and your hands start changing, too. He said Alice had more. Did he take it from her office? Did the extra vials ever exist at all? Why am I letting him do this to me?_

Tyler, his head cocked to one side, was waiting for Brigitte to return from that faraway place in the depths of her own eyes. She blinked and looked into his again, and with the quick connection made, he went on.

"You almost broke our deal last night, Brigitte. You said when you make promises, you keep them."

Brigitte, confused and angry at the way Tyler was standing over her, accusing her of something that she was obviously guilty, was cowed but still irritated enough to snap back with accusations of her own.

"I do," she seethed, "But what about you? You said you would not take something I was not willing to offer, not by force. What you did outside, that seemed pretty out of line." She flexed the wrist around which he had tightened his fingers.

"Did I hurt you?" he sighed, but Brigitte was finding it inexplicably difficult to lie to Tyler.

"No. But you might have."

Tyler nodded.

"Fair enough." He paused for a moment, clearly calculating in his head, "How about we make a new deal?"

Brigitte listened warily.

"We can have sex, tonight, in the hotel. Each going in opposite directions the next morning. I'll buy you a fucking bus ticket the next morning, if you want. _Or_, you can say no. And we can pass the evening in a platonic fashion."

"What's the catch?"

Tyler smiled.

"I drive you on to the next hotel, and we go through the same thing every night until we finish what we've started. Or we reach the Atlantic Ocean. It's not a catch. It's enforced order in a chaotic situation."

Tyler's words from their first encounter in the rehab center floated back to Brigitte on the tail his current statement.

_We can take you, or you come._

The easy way or the hard way. Two paths, one paved with hot coals, one barred by a wall of flame, both extending into the horizon. She could smolder for days under Tyler's supervision, slowly burning her soul until she lost it, or she could take the white heat of one night and use it to cleanse herself of his presence, of one of her many burdens. But there was no guarantee that should she keep her word and surrender to him, that he would feel obligated to keep his. He could have left her at the border, at Lashburn, abandoned her at the rest area in the early morning when no one was around to watch. He also could have driven five miles from Happier Times and ravaged her there in his car, taking what he wanted before giving her what she needed. There were many ways, Brigitte reasoned, that Tyler could have chosen to deal with her in a swift and unsympathetic manner—all different from the steps he had actually taken when confronted with a decision.

_There's something holding him here besides the prospect of getting laid, _thought Brigitte, but she never stopped to think it was _her. _

"Do you have my stuff?" She had to know before she agreed.

Tyler responded by reaching into an inner pocket on his jacket and extracting a vial of the monkshood.

"And there's two more, in the car. I told you Alice was holding out on us."

Brigitte nodded as Tyler sealed his fate shut with sarcasm.

"All right," she acquiesced, knowing that her choice was for the better, "Tonight."

_Tonight, _came Ginger's voice suddenly, _tonight you will find out how numbing the sex act is. But when you kill him afterwards, strewing the bed in which he violated you with his entrails—that, Brigitte, will be as close you ever come to ecstasy._

_Maybe_, Brigitte replied, the idea of her gruesome fantasies morphing into reality satisfying the restless wolf under the surface.

Tyler, clearly pleased and thinking he had won, allowed her to duck from under his confining arms and into the open of the room.

"Okay. You've got ten minutes. Take a piss, get something to eat," he said, returning easilyto the genial tone he had used earlier. He held out a couple bucks, which Brigitte took without protestation.

"I've got coffee in the car for you. Hope you take it black, cause they ran out of cream and sugar this morning, or so the incompetent attendant told me."

Brigitte didn't like coffee at all, but figured she ought to drink some anyhow. Caffeine seemed to affect her sometimes, not just to keep her awake, but to excite her system to the change. If she went through with her plans, she would need the edge provided by her lycanthropic alter ego. The monkshood would come later.

_Give him what he wants and get out_—both without breaking her promise.

Dispatching the transformed Ginger had been an accident. The other murders were indirectly her fault. But could Brigitte kill a man intentionally?

_Well, we'll find out, won't we B?_ Ginger stood, leaning weightlessly on the left side of the door while Tyler paused on the right.

"Tyler," Brigitte said, as he was about to duck back into the hallway, "You won't be disappointed."

Tyler displayed a wicked smile, mirroring the one her sister's shade wore.

"I know. And Brigitte," he added, "Neither will you."

Brigitte, locking the door when he was gone, sighed.

It was going to be a long night.


	6. Chapter 6

_Present_

Ten minutes and two hurriedly consumed candy bars later, Brigitte sat passively in her seat as Tyler maneuvered the car back onto the highway.

"Do you feel better?" he asked.

_I wish I were anywhere but here_, she chanted in her head, but her verbal response was affirmative.

"Yeah. Guess I was tired. And hungry."

"Well I'll be sure to feed you again before we settle in for the evening," he said, smirking. "Any preference for a hotel? I know you've been around."

"Whatever's cheap," she said, running her thumb across the page edges of the atlas stuck beside her seat, "As long as it's clean, I don't give a shit where we do it."

"So no honeymoon suite, then?" Tyler laughed, "No mirrors? Vibrating beds?"

"Not if you expect me to fuck you."

"Shucks," he said, sighing in mock exasperation, "I _so_ had my heart set on getting down to some bad porn."

Brigitte frowned.

"Kidding…" he said, raising his eyebrows, "Kidding. But…"

"Here we go…" She crossed her arms. "There's always a conjunction with you, isn't there?"

"You could say that." Tyler continued, smiling. "I have two conditions."

"Straight-up sex not good enough for you any more? You seemed pretty willing back there." She gestured sharply behind them with her head.

"My preferences have shifted in favor of something more…intimate."

_Just agree, for Christ sakes, _she thought. _The sooner he decides what the fuck he wants you to do, and you do it, the sooner you are rid of him._

"Yeah?" asked Brigitte, diverting her gaze to the landscape outside the window, "And what are they? The conditions? Because if you want me to prance around in a leather bustier and do a striptease to 'Pour Some Sugar On Me,' I am _not_ complying. I don't care what I said before."

"Hmmm," began Tyler, pretending to consider the prospect she had presented, "I wonder…"

Brigitte was getting tired of his teasing tone, and she intended to let him know that.

"Unless you want to drive me all the way to Nova Scotia, you'd better not be serious."

"You're not much for jokes are you?" Tyler asked, obviously getting as peeved with her severity as she was with his silliness.

"What," Brigitte repeated, "Are the conditions?"

Tyler, spacing out for a second, seemed to formulate a picture in his mind.

"One: you wear whatever I pick out for you." When Brigitte opened her mouth to protest, Tyler shushed her. "I promise it won't be leather."

Brigitte sighed, picking up her cup of coffee to sip slowly at the hot brew.

"And?"

"And, two:" said Tyler, "None of this "fuck and run" business. From the minute we check in, to the minute we check out, you're mine. Can you handle that?"

"Yes," Brigitte muttered, "I can handle that."

"Good. Good." Accelerating, Tyler moved the car into the other lane and passed by a slow-moving line of traffic.

_Poor, poor tasty boy,_ snickered Ginger from the backseat, baring her teeth. _He doesn't realize he'll never check out. _

* * *

"The mall?" 

Brigitte asked this incredulously as Tyler make a left into a vast parking lot brimming with cars.

"The mall," he repeated, gliding into the nearest open parking spot, "I've got some shopping to do. You can wander around and try on clothes or shoplift or whatever it is you girls do for fun. But you better be here when I get back."

"I'll be here," she spoke flatly.

Then he withdrew his wallet and fished around a bit before pulling out a hundred dollar bill.

"Here," he said, offering it to her, "For being civil about this. Or trying to be, any way. Spend it."

Brigitte plucked the money from his fingers and shoved it in the pocket of her cords.

"I'll be back in an hour at the most."

She and Ginger, who had stuck around since appearing a half hour before to cackle about Tyler's impending death, watched him get out and head towards the entrance.

_Nice ass,_ said Ginger in all seriousness as she inspected Tyler's retreating form, _But you're turning into, like, such a whore._

"Shut up Ginger," Brigitte said, and she left her sister sitting in the car as she went to put her hard-earned hundred dollars to good use.

She made her way around slowly, glancing here and there for a bargain. She found a decent winter jacket in the clearance section of a large department store, and insisted that the clerk cut off the tags for her, right then and there, so she could wear it. She felt better, having spent part of the money on a necessity. The rest, however, she would throw away on something frivolous—the first purchase made out of want, and not need, in several very long years.

Brigitte let her feet take her to a shop specializing in used cameras and other second-hand photography paraphernalia. She took in the displays hungrily, looking for something under seventy-five in price with decent peripherals. Not caring if that her view had changed, she just wanted to see the lives around her again and not just the deaths she had helped cause.

"How much?" she asked the young attendant. She had picked up a banged up but serviceable Cannon model and held it out for him to inspect.

"Uh, I think that one's a hundred. Mike—hey Mike! C'mere. The lady wants to know how much on this one."

"Mike" made his leisurely way over. He had been flirting with another female customer as Brigitte perused the items, and he didn't seem thrilled to drag his attention away from the other woman and bestow it upon Brigitte.

"Hundred," Mike agreed.

"It's not worth a hundred," Brigitte said, showing him how the film compartment did not quite close, "I'll give you fifty."

"You're joking, lady," Mike snorted, "Besides, we don't do discounts. Priced as is. Take it or leave it."

"My guess is you don't do a lot of business with policies like that," Brigitte returned, putting the camera back onto the shelf. She glared pointedly in the direction of the other woman, who had been listening in, and who seemed discouraged by the non-negotiability of the conversation. Brigitte turned to exit the store, counting on Mike to make the necessary connections. When she heard Mike call from behind the counter, she knew her scheme had worked.

"Seventy-five and it's a deal."

Brigitte turned to look at him over her shoulder.

"Throw in some film and some batteries, and _then_ it's a deal."

Mike looked over towards the other customer, whose interest in her chosen camera seemed to renew after hearing that he was willing to barter, after all.

"Fine," Mike sneered, "Ring 'er up, Pete." In seconds, he had reconvened with the more attractive woman, asking her to make her best offer.

Brigitte, smiling inside, paid for her purchase without another complaint. When she found the car again, Tyler had yet to return. So she opened the camera box and removed the tiny piece of plastic—part of the tag from her coat—that she had jammed in the hinge of the film compartment cover.

_You're a whore and a liar_, whispered Ginger, obviously pleased.

Ignoring her sister, Brigitte deftly loaded a roll of film and opened the shutter, rolling down her window so she could gaze through the viewfinder at the people milling about the parking lot. There were typical teenagers who had ditched class; the older men and women with business suits and briefcases, hurrying about as if they were perpetually late; and there were children, who either hopped and skipped along in front of their caretakers or clung to an elder's hand shyly. Brigitte imagined she and Ginger as children again. Ginger, with her bold red hair, had always been eager to run on ahead without looking back, and Brigitte, spare with words from the moment she could talk, had always hung back, pressing her face into her mother's thigh shyly when confronted with a strange face. Then the sisters had grown simultaneously—they had made the pact, and vowed to stay together forever. Nevertheless, Brigitte had still been the one to lag behind, to second-guess everything Ginger did and then do it alongside her any way. They had always been playing at death, and Brigitte wished suddenly for the death project photographs she had left behind in Bailey Downs, even the particularly bloody one of Ginger impaled on the white picket fence. It was a signature shot—their final fuck you to suburbia and everything it represented.

And then Ginger had died. She had done it differently than they had planned, but she had died nonetheless, had skipped off in the horizon and left Brigitte behind, clinging to life, for the final time. She had tried to follow Ginger too late, and now she was stuck where she did not want to be, between a monster and a man.

The monster, if given the chance, she would kill.

The man, if given the chance, she would let live.

But Brigitte did not believe in fate or luck or anything of the sort. She had seen and felt the hard things in life—she had felt them with her fingertips and wondered how she had managed to live so long and not once put the scalpel to her throat.

"You bought a coat. And a camera."

Brigitte turned quickly away from her window to the outside world. Tyler had returned, and he was in the process of tossing several bags of various shapes and colors into the back seat.

"Yes."

"Are you into photography?" he asked, and she nodded, cradling the machine in her hands. She knew he wouldn't try to take it from her, but felt overly possessive nonetheless. She had not held a camera in a long time—too long.

"I used to take a lot of pictures," said Brigitte, closing the shutter to keep the batteries fresh.

"Oh?" Tyler swung into his seat and started the car with a quick flick of the wrist, "What of?"

"All kinds of things," she sighed, "But mostly my sister."

Tyler put the car back onto the multi-lane road that would take them to the hotel before saying anything else.

"So you have a sister."

"Had a sister."

Tyler turned to look at her for a moment, studying her face as she went on without hesitating. It felt wonderful to tell someone else about Ginger's magic.

"She was really pretty but she didn't want to be—we dressed kinda weird for teenage girls. We shared a room, and we covered it with these pictures we took, pretending that we had died. She was obsessed with death. And because she was, I was, too."

"Sounds like you were…close," Tyler ventured, perhaps a little disturbed by Brigitte's confession.

"Yeah. Close." Brigitte sighed. "She was a real bitch the majority of the time, but she could be sweet, too. Your typical older sibling."

When Tyler didn't say anything, she concluded with, "She's dead," in a near whisper that seemed blasphemous. How could Ginger be dead when she still existed within Brigitte's conscience, when Brigitte could see her then, lounging in the backseat, watching Brigitte watch her in the rearview?

"Isn't it ironic," spoke Tyler lyrically, but he sounded sympathetic. And then,

"How did she die?"

Brigitte decided, once again, to be as vague as possible.

"Complications. She was very sick. Her time…it just ran out."

They sat in silence for a few minutes.

"Is that why you started using? Why you ran away? Because your sister died?" His questions were simple, but they had more elaborate answers than Brigitte could hope to give him.

"Yes," she said, and timidly, she asked a question of her own.

"Do you have any brothers or sisters?"

"No. Only child."

_No wonder he's so demanding,_ Brigitte thought, choosing to press a little further.

"Where…"

Tyler, however, cut her off sharply, his amiable tone fading into what Brigitte took for anger.

"Does it matter?" he asked. His hands had tightened on the steering wheel, and his jaw was set.

"I guess not," she said softly, ready to retreat into her own thoughts again, "Sorry."

Tyler took a deep breath, and taking one hand off the steering wheel, reached over and placed it on her shoulder.

"Let's just say," he concluded, "We aren't so different in certain aspects, you and I."

For the first time since they had been on the road, Brigitte's interest in Tyler's background was piqued. She knew nothing about him, really, other than bare observations—he had her drug and knew how to administer it, his hands were smooth and he used them gently for the most part, he could probably teach her how to drive a car, and for some strange reason he wanted to possess her completely for one crazy night. All this time she had thought _her _secrets were the ones that mattered—now she wasn't so sure. She even felt a little sorry when he removed his hand from its resting place on her shoulder, needing it to turn the wheel. Then he was smiling, again, and Brigitte saw they had pulled into the healthily populated parking lot of a Super 8.

"Wait in the car," Tyler said, and in what Brigitte interpreted as a gesture of faith, he left the keys in the ignition, the car running.

* * *

The room looked clean to the human eye, but Brigitte's nose told her differently. Immediately upon opening the door, a plethora of scents battered her senses. From ten feet away she could smell the old sex on the unbleached sheets, the piss smell emanating from the carpet, on which she trod reluctantly. She thought she could hear, with her keen ears, cockroaches scrabbling inside the thin walls. 

Tyler didn't seem to notice the reek of filth permeating from the bed as he stepped past Brigitte into the room, surveying the outdated décor. Lobbing his duffel bag towards the headboard, he sat on the edge of the bed, testing the mattress with a few determined bounces.

"Seems decent enough," he said, his hand on the bedspread at the spot of an ancient stain only Brigitte's moon-eyes could discern. He got up and flicked on the bathroom light, peering behind the shower curtain. His less than thorough inspection over, Tyler took off his jacket and folded it over the back of one of the armchairs on which Brigitte was afraid to perch.

"I'm gonna sleep some more," he declared, choosing the left side of the bed to stretch out on.

Brigitte tried to reconcile herself to the fact that she would find fault with any room at this hotel. She was becoming more fearful as the minutes passed, and the monster inside her had woken and was prowling around, wiring her senses beyond even her normally heightened capacity.

"Are you just going to stand in the middle of the room? With the camera in your hand?" he asked, having shifted onto his side, propped up on one elbow. He raised his eyebrows with inquiry, but Brigitte could not bring herself to answer the question. Standing still at the moment seemed like the best thing to do.

Tyler, persistent as always, patted the unoccupied stretch of mattress beside him invitingly.

"You should get some more sleep, too, if you can," he advised, and then added, "I don't need to tell you why."

Brigitte, her arms crossed, hesitated.

"Come on, I won't bite," teased Tyler, attempting to look innocent and failing miserably.

_But I might_, thought Brigitte. Her canines, now sharply pointed, had elongated in the short interval while she waited in the car for Tyler to check them in. Her ears felt strange, as if they were growing at the tips, and her palms itched as the hair beneath the skin grew towards the surface. Becoming increasingly agitated, the monster inside wanted out from its hiding place. Brigitte could practically feel it clawing at her heart.

_Wait, wait, _she whispered to the beast, enduring the pain it provided to make its point, _Wait only a little longer._

With those soothing promises to comfort it, the beast seemed to comply. After all, Brigitte was still weak with lack of sleep and food, both of which she would have soon. And then…but Brigitte could not think ahead without arousing both the beast and her own subdued desires. For the moment, there was only Tyler on the bed before her, beckoning.

He was still watching her intently, expecting _something_, when she returned to herself.

Her head ducked submissively, Brigitte padded lightly across the room, setting the camera on the bedside table and shucking her sneakers.

"It's okay," he said, encouraging her with a smile, and lying back down, "Let's just take a little nap. Then I'll get up, shower, and go for some takeout. You like Chinese?"

"Mmm hmmm," murmured Brigitte, sliding awkwardly onto the filthy bed, glad he didn't see her cringe when she did.

"Come on," he coaxed, sounding as if he were speaking to a small, frightened dog. She inched closer to Tyler, and as she moved, he laid perfectly still, waiting to see how she would arrange herself.

Shifting towards the left, she carefully fitted her form to his, curled her body into his side. Her head she let rest in the comfortable hollow below his shoulder, and Brigitte, swallowing convulsively, let her right hand hover in midair for a moment, before placing it on Tyler's stomach, light as a feather.

Sighing contentedly, he moved his own arm up to stroke her side through the thin sweater. His touch was easy, sweet, and Brigitte felt guilty for enjoying the caress he provided.

"Good girl. Now that wasn't so hard, was it…" he whispered, blinking languidly until he let his eyes fall shut.

Brigitte, whose three days' fatigue was still able to overpower the stimulant provided by the coffee, replied out loud without forethought, as she closed her own eyes.

"You have no idea," she yawned, but Tyler didn't hear her. She drifted off to a dreamless sleep, the rhythm of his deep breathing her lullaby.

* * *

When she woke, hours later, it was dark again and Tyler was gone, presumably to fetch the food. There was a folded note attached to one of the smaller shopping bags, her name written in scrawling sharpie on the front. She stood and arched her back, feeling refreshed and wired all at once. The beast made itself known, sending a shockwave of sudden pain up her spine as she stretched. She raised a hand to her ears—they had taken on an elfin shape. Her fingernails had become hardened and brittle, shaping themselves into claws, too, but Brigitte figured she had at least a few hours before the changes became too noticeable to ignore. 

She opened the bag he had addressed to her and found various toiletries inside—shampoo, body wash, a comb, a toothbrush.

_Brigitte,_ the note said_, I figured you might want to take a shower, too, seeing as it's probably this first real shower you've been allowed since getting thrown into Happier Times. This is by no means an insinuation that you're not clean—I think only of your own comfort in this matter. I still expect a good fuck, later, whether you use this stuff or not. I'll be back later with food—T._

Brigitte almost smirked at his strange roundabout way of apologizing for buying her hygiene-related items. She had been aching for a shower, really, ever since leaving the care facility. Her hair was greasy and unbrushed, and her skin felt grimy. And if she was lucky, the hot water might wash away some of the apprehension that still dogged her, regarding the evening's upcoming events.

When Ginger had come back that October night, bloody and tearful, Brigitte had assumed the worst regarding that bastard Jason. Then Ginger had revealed the real reason for her distress—the death of the little terrier Norman, who had barked his last when he chose to harass his disgruntled neighbor. She had still been so very _hungry_, Ginger had explained, even after the unimpressive loss of her virginity. And she had fucked Jason up pretty badly any way, transferring the virus to him as easily as any common STD. Brigitte had hoped later that Jason was one of the lucky ones that had died quickly, and without doing too much damage.

Still, even after Ginger's lackluster description of copulation, sex continued to intrigue Brigitte. Her early teenage years, spent obsessed with the macabre instead of "girly" things like crushes and nail polish and pretty lingerie, had been purposefully directed, under Ginger's supervision, to exclude those very things. On paper she was still a teenager, only just seventeen, but over two and a half years of running and thinking almost exclusively of her ailment had deprived Brigitte of even typically naïve sexual knowledge. Sure, she had read the biology books; sure, she had had that painful conversation with Pamela at fifteen—Brigitte could taste milk, souring in her throat, as she remembered—but when it came down to Tyler touching her like no one had dared before, Brigitte wasn't sure what to expect.

The aborted attempt at intimacy in his car was fresh in her memory—would he let her suffer awkwardly for before taking charge again? Would he want to kiss her ugly mouth when she would not smile? Would she enjoy it at all, as she had fleetingly hoped then? Would she hold on to her human self in the throes of passion—she seemed to think it would be passionate, to some degree, at least—or would she let the beast break free and destroy Tyler when he was at his most vulnerable?

Her relentless pursuer plodded to the forefront of her mind. Where was he? They had traveled a long way in a short time, but the wolf had the advantage of stamina, whereas Brigitte and her human companion had stopped for several hours already and planned to stay all night in one place. The beast might catch up, might catch them fucking and then do the necessary murdering for her. Then once again she would run away, free from sin, leaving death in her wake without intending to. She needed to kill Tyler herself, to know that she had done something awful, and thus eclipse all the other deaths she had not meant to initiate. She needed to kill Tyler.

The problem was, Brigitte knew, that she did not want to kill Tyler. She did not want to kill anyone except the wolf.

But Tyler was the wolf, only in a different form. He too, pursued her, wanting the same things the beast wanted. His outside appearance was beautiful, but his insides were just as ugly. He would fuck her and leave her—leave her to go on alone.

She was always alone, even if her dead sister came around occasionally to disperse dodgy advice.

She was always alone, but she did not have to be.

The wolf inside or the wolf outside—either way she would have _something. _But it was wrong, wrong, wrong to want Tyler as a partner. He would be dead, destroyed, whether she actually stopped his heart or not.

Her logic collapsed, and panic washed over her.

_I can't do this_, Brigitte cried internally, _I cannot do this. I cannot be here, I cannot be anywhere. I have to leave._

Before she could reach for the doorknob, however, there was Ginger, standing in front of her and blocking her exit.

_What's the matter? You aren't getting cold feet?_

"Ginger, let me by."

_Oh I see, _Ginger whispered, cocking her head to the side, _You want the beastie to be your first time…fucking you from behind…his half-turned bitch._

"Ginger," Brigitte pleaded, "Let me go."

_I thought you understood this, B. I thought you were stronger than this._

"For Christ sakes Ginger, let me out!" But Brigitte, even in screaming her plea, had not moved from her spot. She already knew what Ginger would say next.

_If you wanted to leave, you could leave. All you have to do is push through the girl standing in front of you. Remember B, she's not really Ginger. She's not even real. She's just…you._

Brigitte watched as Ginger's image dematerialized, leaving the door unobstructed.

_You are fucked up_, she thought, listening in vain for Ginger's voice to return. It didn't.

_You are one fucked up girl, who is about to become one fucked up woman. Better make yourself presentable before he gets back. Better make yourself think clearly. Better not let those feelings in the pit of your stomach overwhelm you. This is it…this is what you were waiting for. You are capable. You are stronger. You…will…endure._

She undressed and stepped into the shower, and when the water poured in torrents down her naked body, she felt cleaner, somehow, than she had in years.


	7. Chapter 7

_Present_

Part of Tyler didn't wanted to get up when he woke a little after eight. In her slumber, Brigitte had clenched her hand around a handful of his tee shirt, had thrown one of her legs across his, and now emitted soft nasally snores into his shoulder. He chuckled quietly, having rearranged her legs, as he tried to prise her fingers from the fabric of the tee shirt—she merely moved her head at the disturbance and tightened her grip. Tyler was immediately thankful she had not been clutching his arm as she had in the clinic. Her fingernails had been sharp then—now they left neat little cuts in the cotton as she shifted again, releasing her hold on Tyler's clothing and instead laying her hand flat on her thigh. Tyler rolled to his right so he could support her head as he slid his arm out from underneath the black tresses. She batted her eyes a few times, the pupils unfocused, but Tyler presented a smile so she could see, if she woke up, that the nap had been a success. Her eyelids, however, sunk back down, and in seconds she was under again.

He lay there facing her for a few moments, taking the opportunity to smooth back the strands of hair that had fallen across her face. She was beautiful in a dangerous way he had not expected from so small a person. As his fingers glanced across the arch of her ear, Tyler stopped and carefully ran them back in the opposite direction. Brigitte jerked her hand up in a defensive swat, pulling the hair forward again. Tyler could not deny that the tip of her ear, which poked from between sections of her dark locks, was pointed, and in a distinctly inhuman fashion. Brigitte yawned suddenly, and as he watched her mouth open wide he spied, too, the fang-like shape of her four canine teeth.

Standing up slowly, he shook the sleep out of his limbs. He felt completely refreshed and ready for anything—except maybe the abnormalities of Brigitte's person he had just witnessed.

It was strange, he thought, that he hadn't noticed them before—he'd been in close proximity to her for the past twenty-four hours and the only thing that had stood out were her golden eyes. He had seen eyes that color before—he remembered, now, several things that he had tried his damnedest to forget. But Tyler told himself that Brigitte's eyes had nothing to do with the eyes—and the person to whom they belonged—that plagued his memories. He pushed the memories back to their well-guarded prison cells, and pictured Brigitte in all her delicate glory. Letting his mind travel only a few hours into the future, Tyler tried to think of finally getting what he knew he deserved. Smirking, he retrieved his jacket from the chair and slung it on, plucking the keys from the desk and stifling their cacophonous jingling. Allowing himself one backwards glance at her curled sleeping form, Tyler left the hotel room and drove towards the mall, where he knew there was a Chinese restaurant. As he drove he hummed along to the radio, tapping his fingers and thinking dirty thoughts about his next conquest, but the memories he had so carefully blocked for many years weren't gone. They were merely waiting—waiting for the right time to burst forth and flood Tyler's mind with images of imperfection and terror, waiting for the best moment to make Tyler realize his potentially fatal mistake.

* * *

_Past_

As a child growing up in a suburb of Edmonton, Tyler felt his life was the most accurate definition of "normal" he had ever encountered. He lived with his mother and father in a little split-level just large enough for the three of them, at the end of a street named after a tree, like all the others in their town. His father worked for an obscure company, carried a briefcase and kissed his mother goodbye every morning on the front stoop just like in the movies. His mother was the ideal housewife—she cooked, she cleaned, she grew roses in the front yard that the entire neighborhood envied. Both his parents were good-looking people—blond, blue-eyed and the producers of the perfect blond, blue-eyed progeny. At least that was what he often heard his mother's friends titter to her over the white-picket fence, their conversations peppered with, "You have the most beautiful (insert possession here), Abagail," and "Your husband's so reliable, Abagail," and "Your little boy's so adorable, Abagail," and "You positively glow, Abagail!" She did seem to light up like a beacon whenever paid a compliment, Tyler noticed, and for many years, she was the center of his world, a maternal sun.

An average student, all his teachers adored him nevertheless. He was always polite, always quick to admit a mistake or apologize to his peers if he upset them somehow. He drew pictures of his blue-eyed blond family standing next to their white house with the white fence and the red, red of the roses peaking out between the slats, their thorny foliage such a dark shade of green it looked black. He wrote stories about he, his mother, and their adventures around the neighborhood, adding in commonplace elements of surprise like a haunted house or rescued puppy or kitten or a scary old man who turned out to be the nicest guy once you came to know him. He had lots of playmates, boys and girls, but none of them could compete with his mother and her ability to piece together their perfect lives—his, his father's and hers—like one of her jigsaw puzzles, from which she sometimes saved the last piece so Tyler could complete the picture.

She even let Tyler's dad bring home a dog for his son, despite her dislike of animals. Tyler named the young collie bitch Serafina because the puppy, according to his child's eyes, was "angelic", and soon Tyler's pictures contained a well-behaved Lassie-dog, as well. Serafina adored him and tolerated his father, but from an early age and into adulthood she had been cautious, even skittish around Abagail. Tyler's mother tried to explain the dog's behavior away as "temperament problems" and insisted that Serafina stay outside in the backyard while her husband and her son were at work and school, "just in case something goes wrong." Tyler was too young to understand Serafina and his mother's mutual dislike, and so attributed the family's rival female behavior to jealously over his affection.

He carried his bright blue lunchbox dutifully and never would trade lunches with any of the other children. His mom always seemed to know exactly what to pack in the plastic container, what clothes to buy before school began in the fall, what toys to allow him to bring to class for show and tell, and Tyler quickly learned from her unintentional example how to make the rest of the world jealous of his ideal existence.

When Tyler announced he wanted to be a doctor at age eight, his parents were ecstatic. Their son would grow up and be someone who made a difference in the lives of other people—and after a great deal of hard work he, too, might someday have everything they had and a child of his own with whom to share it all.

The only problem was, Tyler knew, that despite the façade his parents had erected in front of themselves and their son, behind the kept home and money and Aryan good looks they all possessed, there were several pieces of the puzzle of their lives no one seemed able to find, and for which no one seemed willing to search.

* * *

When he was ten he walked in on his mother in the bathroom by accident, causing her to drop the needle she was holding to her forearm in a surprised clatter. 

"What're you doing Mom?" he asked tentatively, reaching down to retrieve the needle, full of a yellowish liquid, where it had rolled to a stop at his feet.

"Oh honey, I guess I should have explained this to you sooner. Mommy has diabetes, and she needs to take an insulin shot every once in awhile to make her sugar stay at a healthy level. And your father…Daddy's a diabetic, too, muffin. So if you ever see one of us doing this again, don't worry. We need to do it to be healthy, darling. Do you understand?"

"When I'm a doctor will I be able to make you better?" Tyler asked, and his mother sighed.

"Oh baby, you can't fix this," she said, smiling in the sad way she did when watching old movies. She went on to explain the mechanics of the treatment, even letting him stay and watch her stick the needle in a bright blue vein in the crook of her arm. He was intrigued and helpful but disappointed when she ushered him out the door so she could take a bath.

Before he went he made a promise that, years later, he would regret.

"I'll help you Mom, I swear I'll find out how to fix you."

"Aren't you sweet," she said, flashing a brighter smile, and then gently prodded him the rest of the way out of the room and shut the door behind him.

Tyler never suspected anything until years later when he found out in biology that diabetics had to shoot their medicine into their stomachs or legs every day, and that insulin was clear-colored. He had failed to connect the cakes his mother baked, and that both his parents helped consume, to the sugar she used to make them. And he had failed to find his mother in the throes of a fix, her teeth clamped so tightly together her jaw was sore for days afterwards, her fists clenched so that her fingernails made little half-moon cuts into her palms.

* * *

He liked to walk Serafina in the afternoon after school, as his mother kept her confined to the backyard all day with no one to play with. He kept the habit straight into Junior High when most of his friends were starting to neglect their pets and cartoons. Parties and trying out for the high school sports teams and "chasing skirts," which was how his father referred to Tyler's developing interest in girls, were the new cool things to do, and Tyler, having always been the epitome of cool, could not very well be left behind. When the first grown-up birthday party thirteen-year-old Tyler was allowed to attend ended, he walked home having just spent "7 Minutes In Heaven" with Heather Dole—one of the prettiest girls in the eighth grade—and knew things were beginning to change, but could not yet tell whether it would be for better or for worse. 

His father, moving up the corporate ladder, had been spending longer and longer evenings at the office, often neglecting to call Tyler's mother and let her know that she only needed to make enough dinner for her and her son. He drove to conferences in Calgary and Vancouver and sometimes as far away as Ontario, and because he always brought Tyler back something—a tee-shirt, a baseball cap, an anatomy coloring book he swore real medical students used—the son never questioned the father's motives for escaping for days at a time. And his mother, who had seemed to grow abruptly older one morning, with the appearance of wiry grey hairs amid the soft blond and crows' feet at the corners of her blue eyes, always seemed to lose a little strength each time her husband left, only to regain it when he returned.

The first time Tyler woke to raucous howling from down the hall, he panicked. A hundred terrible thoughts ran in succession through his head— Was that Serafina? No, Serafina didn't howl, and he could hear her barking, too. Where was the noise coming from? His parents' bedroom. Was someone hurt? Was his father hurting his mother? He ran quickly down the hallway, his bare feet smacking on the hardwood floors. Throwing open the door of his parent's room, Tyler saw his mother, naked and on all fours on the bed, and his father, with his pants and boxers around his ankles, behind her. Both of them moved as one, grunting loudly between howling crazy sexually charged notes. And then his mother whipped her head around, glaring at him through a tangled curtain of blond hair with yellow, yellow eyes.

"Tyler, get the fuck outta here," she bellowed in a voice that was not her own, and without missing a beat his father reached around and flung the door shut with such force that it knocked Tyler back onto the floor.

After throwing up in the downstairs bathroom, Tyler put on his sneakers and went outside to Serafina's dog house. They must have put her outside on purpose, and the poor canine whined until Tyler managed to squeeze his growing frame inside the structure with her. She licked his face and curled around his sitting form, calmed down, but Tyler could not strike the violent images from his mind and spent the entire night with his eyes wide open, afraid to close them for what he might see.

The next morning when he went back into the house, his father was sitting, newspaper open, at the small kitchen table, and his mother, robed in her baby blue terry cloth, stood at the counter slicing up a cantaloupe with smooth movements of her knife against the melon flesh. Before Tyler could apologize for walking in on them, his father cleared his throat and shook his head.

"I'm sorry you had to witness that, son, but it's a fact of life. We were having sex like any normal married couple. Surely they've talked to you about all this in school?"

"Yes." Tyler recalled the sex-ed classes he and his friends had laughed about for weeks after the fact. He had half-listened and didn't really understand any of the details the crotchety old instructor had spouted, but a few things had stuck in the back of his brain—the words _adults _and _consensual _and _love_.

"Well then you understand its something two people who are in love do when they want to express that love," Tyler's father said, but the sour expression he used when he said the word love just made Tyler more uneasy. "And that it's perfectly normal."

"Okay Dad," Tyler said, watching his mother to see if she would turn around from her task and confirm that what he had seen was indeed okay, that it was normal. Because it seemed to Tyler that _that _was not normal, not at all. But Abagail never moved, just kept working, the bite marks on her neck angry blemishes on her pale skin.

From then on he forced himself to sleep with headphones on, the music drowning out the noises his parents made when they "made love," if you could even create something so strange and nauseating from _love.

* * *

_

As a freshman Tyler courted Heather Dole, who only played hard to get for a few days before she gave into his natural charm and became his girlfriend, and by sophomore year they seemed permanently attached at the lips. He did his homework and spent his time after school either playing lacrosse on the school's championship winning team or exploring the avenues of his relationship with Heather underneath the foldaway bleachers next to the field. He never told her about witnessing his parentscopulating, but wondered to himself if sophisticated Heather would like _that, _when she had never let him touch her below the waist. He didn't push sex, not aggressively, because he wasn't sure he wanted it despite the way his friends boasted of the act.

His mother, whom he saw shooting up more and more as his father stayed away for longer and longer periods, invited the girl over to dinner often, where he and Heather engaged in a lot of innocent activities like throwing the Frisbee for a spry-as-ever Serafina and sitting in the living room watching television. Heather was not to go upstairs into Tyler's room, especially on the rare occasions when his father was home, and sometimes Tyler grew irritated with her old-fashioned mentality. It was the nineties after all, and Tyler had to keep up with his experimenting friends—or at least pretend to.

The balmy June day he turned sixteen Tyler woke to find a shiny new Mustang in the driveway next to his father's silver Mitsubishi and his mother's red Cadillac. He ran outside in his boxers and tee-shirt and elicited laughs from the neighbors, but he didn't care. "You have to earn the right to own it," his father said, and gave newly licensed Tyler reasonable tasks to complete over the long vacation and the opportunity to drive it to school the first day of his junior year. Tyler, never one to disappoint, earned the money for the insurance by doing yard work and odd jobs in between lacrosse training and trysts with Heather. The night before school began, Tyler's father handed him the keys to the mustang with a simple smile, and Tyler drove into the parking lot the next morning with Heather in the passenger seat, once again the envy of everyone around him.

Five days later, his mother appeared at the breakfast table with a bruise blossoming dark purple across her cheek, and five days after that his father came home from work so drunk he barely made it to the couch before passing out. The frightening noises had made bold escapes from the bedroom and now his parents yelled at each other in front of him as if there were no point to hiding their problems any more, nor to hide the hatred each held for the other that culminated when they fucked and practically tore each other apart. But his mother, heavily made up, still kept her daily appearances at the white picket fence, serene in oatmeal colored slacks, cardigan and gardening gloves, where she fondled her blood red rose blossoms in a careful manner and her neighbors, never the wiser, stopped to admire her still.

"You're perfect," Heather murmured to Tyler one chilly fall evening as they lay clothed in layers and stretched on a blanket in his backyard, Serafina dreaming at his side. And Tyler, who had held onto the delusion for so long, could not bring himself to contradict her.

* * *

"You can't leave!" His mother screeched these words and they carried down the stairs on an ill wind to where Tyler had his biology homework spread across the coffee table, the television tuned to MTV. He considered turning up the volume, but hit the down button on the remote instead. 

"It's time to give up Abagail," his father retorted, his voice controlled, "You can't fix this."

"But I need you! You can't abandon me! What'll I do? Where will I find another way to hold it inside?"

"There are others out there, Abagail, like you. People who can satisfy you. God knows I tried to be a good husband, but I just can't deal with it any more."

"Oh I bet she deals with this so much better than me, huh? Did you infect her too, you bastard? We keep it underwraps for sixteen years and then you go sticking it to that little bitch the instant she opens her legs…"

"We use protection," Tyler's father retorted, but this only prompted a maniacal laugh from Tyler's mother.

"You fucking fool. You think that'll stop it? The condom will break one of these times—you'll get too rough—and then you'll be fucking sorry. She'll go batshit and then you'll have to get rid of her and you'll be alone again. And then you'll just keep spreading it and spreading it from whore to whore until everyone is like you—alone."

"That's not true…" began Tyler's father, but she cut him off.

"You spineless son-of-a-bitch. I never should have agreed to this. I never should have married you. I wish I had never met you!"

"Well that makes two of us," he growled, and the next thing Tyler heard was a shriek of pain. He stood up, ready to go upstairs and separate them as he had to do once in a while when he couldn't stand the fighting any more. His father flew down the stairs, luggage in hand and jacket draped over his arm, fresh scratches livid on his face.

"I'm sorry, son, but I can't stay here any more," he said when he paused at the door, "Get out as soon as you can, kid. Just get the fuck away from here, from her. She's a monster."

"I heard that you asshole," his mother, who had appeared at the top of the stairs, a new bruise developing over her left eye, spat, "If you're going, go already."

"Take care of the car, and Serafina," were his father's last words to Tyler, and then he disappeared out the door.

The sound of the silver car disappeared into the melee of other afternoon noises.

"You're not allowed to bring the dog inside anymore," Abagail said.

Tyler decided not to argue with her. Instead, he helped her to the bathroom where he cleaned up the bruises on her face and gave her a dose of her preferred poison.

"Hey, you're getting pretty good at this," she said, watching as he slid the needle expertly into her vein, "You'll make a very good doctor someday."

Tyler didn't reply, just left her sitting on the cold tile floor, her knuckles white from the grip she had on the rounded edge of the porcelain sink.

* * *

It was three-fifty-two in the morning, a year to the day after his father had left for good, when Tyler felt his mother crawl into bed next to him, removing his headphones from his ears. She smelled of vodka, which was nothing new of late, but when he tried to guide her back to her own room she clung, trembling, to him, muttering some nonsense about Serafina. She touched his face with a wet hand, and when Tyler flicked on the light he stood horrified in front of the mirror, her bloody handprints all over his white tee-shirt, his arms and his head. The blue cotton nightgown she wore only in the summer was soaked heavy with blood and for a moment Tyler thought she had hurt her self. 

"Mom…mom, what's wrong? What did you do?"

"It's not me, it's Serafina. Oh God honey, I'm sorry," she repeated several times, trying to embrace him, but he detached her from his body and leapt down the stairs, grabbed a flashlight from its place in a kitchen cupboard, and ran out of the back door, swearing when his feet touched the cold grass. Swallowing convulsively, he flicked on the light and directed it towards the doghouse.

"I am a monster," his mother sobbed from behind him, but Tyler could only stare at the mangled body of his canine companion, hanging from the chain that was looped around a tree branch, dripping blood into a pool below her.

He pulled the collie's body down while it was still dark and buried her deep in the plot of earth near the gardening shed as the sun came up. Then he built a fire in the barbecue pit and, taking a torch, carefully burned all the grass that his mother had stained with Serafina's blood. By the time he had finished and gone inside, he felt too sick to go to school. His mother, having cleaned up and changed, went out and tossed her nightgown on the fire, and Tyler followed suit with his own bloodstained clothes soon after. Then he sat down at the kitchen table across from Abagail and incredulously demanded an explanation.

"What the fuck happened last night? I mean, I know you never liked the fucking dog, but God, Mom!"

She didn't speak for several minutes, and then finally offered the only explanation she thought he would understand.

"I've gone completely batshit, Tyler. I'm psychotic. You should have me committed."

"Mom…"

"No, I'm serious," she said, her eyes wide and wild and that yellow color that Tyler would never forget, "It's the only way to stop it."

"To stop what, Mom?"

"It," she hissed back, pointing to her chest, "That _thing _inside me. The one that's been there under the surface all along."

"Mom, you're scaring me," Tyler admitted, backing his chair up slightly.

"You should be scared," she said, cocking her head, "Because what happened to Serafina might happen to you next, and I won't be able to stop it."

She stood up and moved to the counter, fiddled with the coffee pot.

"You should leave as soon as you can," she said, "Your father left me plenty of money, I could give you some." She turned, and he was relieved to see that her eyes were fading back to blue—darker and deeper than the color of either his or his fathers.

"But I need to graduate Mom, I need that diploma. I'll take you to the doctor Mom, or to a psychiatrist. You were drinking--you've got to stop drinking. But don't make me leave now, not after this. You could hurt yourself."

"I'm more afraid of what I could do to you," she said, clinking her teaspoon in the cup of coffee she had poured. She sat down next to him at the table and Tyler tried to read the reasons why she had done what she had in the hard lines of her face. The neighbors did not think she was so perfect anymore, with her husband running off to Vancouver with another woman, the rosebushes along the fence dry and withering away, her clothes hanging off her like sheets because she never ate any more. They did not bother to hide their sympathetic looks from Tyler, who still seemed so promising—the captain of the lacrosse team and on his way to a pre-med program at the local university.

Tyler suddenly couldn't bear to sit at the table with her anymore, so he got up and started to leave the room when she spoke, very quietly.

"You probably ought to lock your door at night."

Tyler went upstairs to his bedroom and locked himself in, crying unmanly tears that fell in drops onto the floor where he sat, wedged in the small space between the dresser and the bed. When school let out for the day, he called Heather and told her that he was breaking up with her. She said "fine," without much emotion—the reaction he had expected, having grown so distant and unaffectionate over the course of the year. Then he settled the mouthpiece back into the cradle with a clunk so he could go ahead and cry some more.

* * *

Doctors told Tyler it was severe depression, a result of her world collapsing around her, and wrote prescriptions that his mother would crumple at the bottom of her purse because she could not mix real drugs and the one she still pumped into her arm with alarming regularity. Sometimes it was yellow, sometimes it was purple, but it always had the same effect—the next day she would seem calmer and more level headed, and then begin the slow descent back into madness. Tyler thought about checking her into rehab, but that required Abagail's consent, which she undoubtedly would not give. She had changed her mind about being committed—now she told Tyler, each time they neared a hospital, that he better not try to make her stay there. The last psychologist Tyler took her to had been a failure—the poor man had a heart attack during the session. His mother's explanation: "He was quite old, darling. Something I said must have set him off." 

When Tyler mentioned to one neighbor lady or another how Abagail's eyes had once been a nice shade of cerulean, they dismissed the idea that her eyes had changed color.

"You must be mistaken—Abagail's eyes have always been that odd hazel/light brown/caramel color," they said, "You must have gotten your eyes from your father."

So Tyler gave up and let her be her increasingly agitated self as she let both her appearance and the household fall into shambles.

But he would not let her drag him into her downward spiral to suffer alongside. He had a future—he had always had a future—and even his mother's mental illness would not stop him from doing everything in his power to get there with his dignity, and his own sanity, intact.

One by one, the neighborhood dogs began to disappear. The Thompson's champion Shih Tzu vanished without a trace when Mrs. Thompson let her into the backyard to do her business. The Grant's maniacal Malamute tore the stake from the ground to which they kept him hitched, day and night, and ran off barking into eternity, while the Stowe's old retriever wandered down the street towards the little white house with the picket fence and never came back. The morning Tyler found his mother lying on the floor of the bathroom, traces of blood on her hands and at the corners of her mouth, he remembered her chilling advice about locking his door, and didn't have any difficulty following it.

* * *

Tyler had vivid, nightmarish visions in the depths of sleep while the punk rock from his headphones streamed into his ears. Most of the time they started out in the same way as the silly pictures he used to draw—with the white house and the white fence and the red, red roses. However, in his dreams, it was a permanent winter and the backdrop of woods was dark and threatened to swallow up the home, the gate, and the flowers all in its wide black maw. The roses would begin bright against the porcelain snow but often they would melt hot to the ground like blood and leave indentations in the crystal like so many teeth marks. Then his mother would appear at the blue door, clad in a negligee the color of the bloody pools of roses. But as in most fickle dreams, in an instant she would not be his mother any more—instead, she was a small, pale and dark-haired woman with lines of red, like war paint, drawn across her eyelids and down onto her cheeks. She would walk slowly down the snowy path from the door, the thin material of her gown billowing in the wind that kicked up, revealing how thin and small and vulnerable she was and how much Tyler wished to touch her. And then she would reach him as he appeared suddenly in his own vision, and without warning she would take one ugly, out of place and maliciously clawed hand and rip his heart, still beating, from his chest. His life blood, flowing across the snow into the depressions the dying roses had made, would hiss with heat and the woman—his mother? someone he had never seen in his life? he was not sure because her features were never fixed except the golden glow of her unearthly eyes—would drag his lifeless body back to the night-woods and fade into the darkness from whence she had come, with a parting whisper: 

_You're beginning to understand, aren't you?

* * *

_

In the months when winter melted into spring, Tyler woke nearly every dawn to scratching on his locked door.

"Tyler…"

He ignored her pleas to let her in, her demands that he "fix her" like he promised he would when he was young and had found her with the needle. He stopped looking her in the eye during the day because her pupils had not been the right color since she had killed Serafina, and he spent his nights sequestered in his room, studying.

She went to his graduation ceremony but sat far in the back with the other stragglers, wearing a floppy hat and movie star shades so no one would recognize that Tyler's poor, poor mother had ventured from the house to watch her son. It was a day he had once thought would be among the best in his life, but was merely a disappointment. His father never showed.

Nevertheless, Tyler felt optimistic that final night in his mother's house because when he drew his blinds for the night he noticed the moon hanging in the starred sky like a prize. The next day he would finish packing his belongings into the Mustang and drive off to the apartment he had found near campus—driving off into freedom from the strange hold his mother held over him even as she grew crazier with each passing moment.

He first realized something was terribly wrong when he started from a deep sleep and checked the clock to find it said three-fifty-two AM. His door was shaking on its hinges, and when he removed his headphones the music faded and was replaced by the awful howling he had dreaded for years and the sounds of fists beating against a wooden barrier again and again in desperation.

"You can't leave me! You can't leave me too!" The words came from his mother's mouth, he was sure, but her intonations had thickened into a deep, hoarsely feminine rasp.

"Mom, you need to calm down," he said flatly, trying to disguise the fear in his voice, but she just moaned more and continued to batter at the barricade between them.

"You promised Tyler…You promised you would help me… Open the door, sugar, open the door and fix me…"

Tyler could not even muster his voice to say no. He picked up his phone, prepared to call the local police, but the dial tone was absent when he held the receiver up to his ear.

With the release of another monstrous howl, his mother, who had wasted away to skin and bones, hit his door a final time, snapping the hinges with unexplained strength and creating an opening through which she had slithered before he could escape.

"I don't know how to help you!" Tyler cried, cowering in his bed as she advanced, "I can't fix you!"

"Yes, yes you can," she snarled through labored breaths. She plucked at the hem of her nightgown and pulled it up over her head, exposing her naked and heaving body beneath.

"Mom, what the fuck are you doing?" Regaining control of his senses as panic coursed through him, Tyler made it to the window just as she reached him. With a strength that came from some deep, dark place she wretched his hand away from sash and swung it behind his back.

She babbled on.

"I won't hurt you. I can't hurt you—you're immune. I don't know how, but it skipped you…you have to stop it, Tyler. You have to take it from me and into you and then everything will be better."

Tyler tried to wrestle free of her hold, but despite being almost six inches taller and sixty pounds heavier than his mother, she held him fast. Her nails dug deep into his skin, and he could feel the press of her teeth on the nape of his neck as she forced him back towards the bed.

"Abagail!" Tyler screamed, "Mom, please! Please, Mom, no! God, no…" Whether she pretended not to or could not hear in her state, she made no acknowledgement of his begging as she threw him down viciously onto the mattress. Flipping him over, she put her hands on shoulders and pushed down with so much pressure Tyler thought she would crush the bones under his skin, drive him clear through the foam into the box spring below. Her breasts swung sweaty above his face, and every single nerve in his body battled with itself as she rubbed her bare groin against her son's, her eyes already rolling from side to side with forbidden delight. Tyler's penis stiffened of its own accord, although he fought the desperately wrong sensations with all his strength.

"Yes, yes, you can help me," she cried, forcing herself upon him and setting in motion their unnatural coupling with a rocking of her hips.

"I won't hurt you, baby, baby…it won't hurt you to help me, baby, it won't hurt…no, no…I love you, sugar, I love you, I love…I…I…

And Tyler, his feet sliding and his arms flailing uselessly against the mattress, crying "God, no…no, no, God no," on a reel of terror, stopped fighting the pain and the pleasure and let his mind fly away from the house and into the wood beyond, where he hid until he was sure she had finished with him and left him, panting, in the den of their sin.

* * *

When he felt able to think again, when he could breathe again, he quietly dressed and removed the remainder of his possessions from the house to his car. Driving away, his hands shaking, he thought he heard a muffled gunshot, but kept going, heading somewhere that was as far away from the house—one that had stopped being a home a long time ago—as Tyler could manage. 

The Thompsons found Abagail dead in the bathroom hours later, a pistol that had materialized out of thin air sliding from her hand onto the floor. Before putting the gun in her mouth she had scrawled the words "_This—this is how you fix this—"_ in red ink, on a piece of paper torn from one of Tyler's notebooks, splotchy with spatters of blood from the wound to her head.

* * *

He tried to forget, to erase the violation of his being, by fucking girl after lonely girl as he worked his way sloppily through his female coeds. He was good-looking and a reputably good fuck, so finding someone different to share his bed every night of the weekend proved an easy task. They seemed to understand that he was not something to possess, but someone to possess them for a few hours of ecstasy, and nothing more. There were the repeat offenders too, girls who he tried to dismiss but kept coming back for more. He let them. His motto, voiced often to his jealous but admiring buddies, who found his conquests amusing and irritating at the same time, was something along the lines of _She'll do…hell, they'll all do_. If his friends had known he had lost his virginity not to his high school girlfriend—the story he told—but to his own mother in a fit of _something_—drunken rage? Crazed passion? The influence of her drug? Her own hidden, deranged, incestuous desires?—Tyler would be avoided not envied. So he lied and fucked and lied and fucked and fucked and fucked and let both consume him until he almost believed in each act's respective, redemptive power, until he had almost gotten rid of the memories that frightened him more than the recurring nightmare about the bloody roses and dying by the strange woman's hand ever could. 

He lost the drive to study, to make something of himself, so after two years and an extra semester Tyler opted to take his associates degree and nursing license and get out of the stifling college atmosphere, where the sex and the girls were starting to overwhelm him. The job at Happier Times came as a nice surprise—Alice hired him after only one interview and without having to sleep with him—and he took it very seriously at first, learning a little more each day and nearly rekindling the torch he had held for medicine since a child. But then the memories started to crawl back into the forefront of his brain from their jail-cell places of confinement, and he needed to do something to banish them back again. Unrestricted sex with each member of a limited group of horny teenage girls seemed too risky in a place like the facility, where Alice seemed to keep a tight ship. One of his college friends suggested the obvious solution. Drugs were currency in prison, traded for favors—why would rehab be any different? Alice's job title may have implied that she ran the facility, but in a matter of months, there was no question as to who _actually _had control. He loved every minute of it—the sly corridor exchanges, the dangerous and deliciously varied sexual encounters, the drugs, the _power_. Unable to undo the destruction of his perfect world or his mother's descent into darkness, he needed to do something to maintain the checks and balances in his new world, to keep things from descending into chaos. Once Tyler found a reliable dealer, he set to work exploiting what he had learned in the one economics class he had ever taken.

_Supply and demand. Give and take. Just me and you, in the abandoned section, baby. A little somethin' somethin' for another little something…come on, come on, why are you hesitating? Go ahead. _

_Pick your poison._


	8. Chapter 8

_Present_

After her shower, Brigitte had changed into her spare set of clothes—a pair of jeans, a tee shirt and a form-fitting sweatshirt. She was cold, but there was no way to turn up the heat in the room. She figured, resignedly, that she'd find time to feel warmer later.

She had covered one of the armchairs with a spare towel, and she had sat down to wait for Tyler. She fiddled with her camera a little, holding it in front of her face and taking a few shots, but then she realized how silly and childish she looked. So, setting the camera down, Brigitte proceeded to drum her fingers on the table.

She smelled the food before Tyler had even pulled up in front of their room, and the beast shook itself awake and gnawed a bit on her stomach in anticipation.

They ate unceremoniously, the little table lamp illuminating their meal in a strange domestic glow. He didn't comment as she tore at the strips of teriyaki tenderly, although she was sure she had mentioned her vegetarianism back at the clinic. Perhaps he had forgotten, or perhaps he was just impressed to see her eat, period. Tyler ate a little bit of everything, except the egg rolls. No one wanted the egg rolls, and he laughed at this before chucking the empty cartons and leftovers into the garbage.

It had been a satiating meal, filling her stomach. Brigitte found, however, that her _hunger_ had not been satisfied—that the wolf inside remained ravenous, and—most importantly—ready.

Staring across the table, she wanted him to touch her. The fire beast within her core stood ready to enflame, and to do with him as she pleased—drag her roughened tongue across his chest, dig her claws into his thighs, tear his heart out in ecstasy to claim it as her own—this tide of want engulfed her. She wanted to taste his skin and the crimson flow of his blood; she wanted to watch him suffer. But Brigitte was not quite herself any more, and these graphic thoughts that flashed in her mind were not entirely her own.

Then his scent reached her nostrils, and her spine gave a sharp twinge. Brigitte willed the wolf to lay quiet again, but she had not dosed for almost four days, and the beast, revived, was beyond listening to anything besides the purple drug.

"It's getting late," stated Tyler. He leaned back in his chair and took a long look at her.

"Yes, it's late." Brigitte's mind reeled with canine sensations, but she sat still, and waited for the prodding she knew she would receive. Tyler was very eager, and she could sense his anticipation as clearly as she could smell the sweat beginning to bead on his body.

He cleared his throat.

"Are you ready?" he asked.

Brigitte, licking the last traces of soy sauce from her lips in a gesture she hoped was evocative, replied,

"As I'll ever be." She was frightened and electrically charged all in the same instant, and the combination of fear and adrenaline made her feel drunk, dizzy.

He nodded once, and then moved over to the pile of parcels to select a pink and white striped bag. This he tossed to Brigitte, who caught it in an awkward alligator clap.

She opened the bag to peer inside, but whatever Tyler had chosen to adorn her with was wrapped in tissue paper. She rustled her hand around and felt the slip of silk across her fingertips.

Tyler was digging through another package. He stopped and smiled at her from across the empty room.

"Why don't you go ahead and put it on?" he suggested, his eyes traveling to the bathroom door.

Brigitte, clutching awkwardly at the remnants of her innocence, went to strip them away and attire herself, instead, in the trappings of her awakening.

* * *

The lingerie was red, and barely hit her mid-thigh when she slid it down over her body. It came with a matching pair of panties—those she slipped on just for the show. She knew she would not be wearing them for long, not once the man pacing just outside the door got hold of her. 

Tyler may have been experienced, but Brigitte had confidence that she could wear him out—she would have to. She had already decided, mulling over her options in the shower, that she couldn't just kill him. He was a sleaze and a threat, but he deserved better than consciousness during death. She had seen too many victims screaming for their lives as the wolf tore into their flesh, watching as they were devoured, aware of their own howls of demise.

If he was tired enough, he would sleep.

If he was asleep, she could restrain him.

She looked at the garishly yellow Happier Times tee-shirt crumpled on the floor.

"This stupid thing may have some merit to it after all," she muttered, picking it up and, taking her claws, slicing the cotton into handy strips.

She could hear him tread back and forth, his step light, faltering now and again with what Brigitte assumed was anticipation.

_What the hell does he have to be nervous about_, she wondered. _He _knows_ what he's doing._

She hid the cotton strips away for later, and turned to gaze at her reflection in the mirror. She tried to keep her fear beneath the surface of her cool facade, but it was a struggle she knew she would lose in the end.

_You are a fool, _chided her conscience, taking its own voice for once._ You could have ended this a long time ago, if you had let the wolf choose your course. It's not just the beast inside you hungering for contact…_you_ want this. You want him to put his hands on you…make you see fucking fireworks. _

_So what if I do_, she answered herself, _So what?_

_Do you think it'll make you feel more human? Do you think it'll make the killing easier? You really think you'll be able to have him—have that—and then just…let it go?_

_Yes,_ Brigitte thought, _Yes. I may not have a lot of experience in this particular field, but I know plenty…too much…about letting things go. A sister, a mother, a father, a friend—why will he be any different?_

_Because, _her conscience warned_, because he knows something you don't. Can't you read it in those ice blue eyes?_

_I don't want to know anything more about him! I just want to finish this. Wake up from the nightmare…_

_You are the nightmare, _the voice taunted, echoing in her brain, and Brigitte put her palms to her temples in frustration.Her head in her hands, she willed her inner voice to shut up and stop imitating Ginger while her special version of her sister refused to come to the forefront of her mind.

"Brigitte," Tyler inquired, rapping his knuckles on doorframe, "Are you…you all right?"

"I'm fine," she answered, "I'll be out…in a second."

She took one last look in the mirror at her small form, bathed in the color of lust, the color of blood.

"Isn't it ironic," she repeated to her dark reflection, then opened the door.

* * *

Brigitte stood in the doorway to the bathroom facing him, wearing only a tentative expression and the negligee Tyler had bought her hours before. Her color, revived somewhat with sleep and food, waxed pale against the red of the silk slip, its lacy hem sliding across the surface of her thighs in a heart-stopping fashion. Although underweight, Brigitte managed to fill out the ensemble well enough, her breasts pert and fleshy at the plunging neckline, her hips and belly the subtlest curves beneath the clingy material. Her dark hair, clean and arranged loose around her face, contrasted sharply with the ruby lingerie and her delicate skin. And her eyes, Tyler saw, were molten gold in the dim light—the color of medals and trophies and prizes, representative of what he was about to receive. 

Her eyes were the color of something else, too, and suddenly an image of his childhood pet, his collie Serafina, flashed before his eyes. Tyler couldn't think why. He gazed at Brigitte, refusing to acknowledge the memories that were scritch-scratching at the door leading to his present thoughts, and instead focused on the task at hand.

"It fits," she stated, unsmiling, but Tyler would make her smile before the dawn—of that he was positive.

"It sure does," said Tyler, moving calmly towards his prey with catlike precision. Already barefoot, he was counting on her to do the rest of the work for him.

_Slow and steady_, he repeated silently, his blood boiling.

Brigitte, her eyes on the floor, let him approach. She seemed to be taking a moment to steel her nerves, to prepare herself. He wanted to tell her that he wouldn't hurt her, but he would be lying because she was new and pristine and it _would _hurt. But he would make it a pleasurable pain. Tyler was, after all, a self-proclaimed sex god, and there wasn't much he was not able to do and do well. He had the experience and the necessary stamina, and all he required now was her final permission.

She whispered something he could not hear, then, taking a deep breath, brought her gaze back up to meet his.

"I've never done this before," she declared, and then added, "As if you hadn't already figured that out."

"I told you before, Brigitte. It doesn't matter," he said, breaching the gap between them with one small step. She shrank away from his touch, her confidence wavering as he placed his hands on her body, but how could he blame her? The glow in her eyes may have been electric, but she wasn't anything except terrified.

"Why?" she asked suddenly, and he let his hands stop, one on the small of her back, the other tangled in the thick hair at the nape of her neck.

"Why what?" he answered, pulling her form to meet his. His forehead he rested against hers, waiting for her to elaborate.

"Why did you help me?" Her voice was little more than a murmuring breath against his skin. Tyler smiled and slid his head to the side so he could tease her ear with his reply.

"Because you didn't want me like the others wanted me. And because…you asked me to."

He could feel her trembling.

"I want you now," she said, swallowing mid phrase and skewing her statement as if it had been choking her, "Oh god, I want you now." But she still held her hands idle at her sides, unsure of where to begin.

"Please don't be afraid," he whispered, smiling in earnest and letting his gaze reassure her, "Don't be. I promise I'll be careful. I'll be very, very careful with you, baby."

Brigitte sighed, and slowly slipped her hands up between their chests, where she let them twist together. Her head bowed, she whispered,

"Do what you will."

Tyler hesitated for a split second, his conscience sneaking up to startle him.

_You don't have to do this, _it said,_ you could let her go. Let _it _go. Fucking her is not going to stop the memories…she's just one more score on the tally sheet of your many, many conquests…your pathetic existence…and the memories are still there…your mother…_

Tyler came back to the present, shaking the voice viciously from his head. Brigitte had leaned her head against his chest, her eyes closed, but she shivered still.

"Let's get you warmed up," he intoned huskily, catching her under the legs with one hand so he could swing her up and into his arms. She was feather light but solid, and she entwined her arms around his neck as he carried her to the bed, their mysterious meeting ground.

He set her down with care, propped against the pillows he had prepared, joining her only after unzipping his jeans and letting them drop to the floor. When he tugged at her hips, his thumbs pressing against the jut of her pelvic bones, Brigitte slid into a tastefully reclined position beneath him. He would have to fix that. She had her eyes open now, watching him, her expression expectant.

"Help me," he requested, his hands on the edge of his tee shirt, and she took her nimble fingers and pulled the material forward until it slipped over his head, and then she guided it down his arms, trailing her touch on his skin.

"I'm going to kiss you," Tyler murmured as she let her hands wander warily around his upper body. She nodded, and when he leaned in, she met him halfway.

The kiss was deep, and they did not break it off until Tyler felt as if he was forgetting to breath. He opened his eyes dizzily, his lips still linked to hers, to see Brigitte open hers, too, the fiery yellow of her pupils shining from the depths of her shadowed face. They broke contact and Tyler, his hands sliding over every inch of her he had ached to explore, chuckled quietly.

"Are you laughing at me?" she questioned, sounding hurt and sinking back into the mattress slightly. He saw another facet of the girl before him—the ghosts of an awkward past gliding across her expression. She had been laughed at before—and even with nothing between their skins but a smooth layer of silk she had to be cautious. It was her nature. Tyler was prepared to speak soothingly—it wasn't a technique he had needed at Happier Times, but he still remembered how. She was like the naïve co-eds he would bed at college, eagerly afraid. But she was more, too. She was Brigitte, his for the night—and he planned to make good use of the hours they had together. He could tell her lies, gilded with gentle language, but something told Tyler he would do better if he told the truth.

"No, baby, no," he said quickly, "I was laughing at myself. Thinking this was just another business transaction…when it's clearly…something…else."

He stopped talking and kissed her again. She received it cautiously at first, but as he deepened it, her hands were working, working, her fingertips pressing at his shoulders, his back. He could feel her long fingernails trailing across the skin, leaving little scratches, but Tyler didn't care. Her hair spread ethereally on the pillow, her body below him, the red of the slip, the red of her lips—these were things that mattered.

The ghosts of their pasts slipped away with the moment. Brigitte misplaced her inhibitions somewhere between kisses, knocking the outsides of her thighs on the insides of his, demanding with motion that he set them free. So he shifted and she slid her legs up and apart, clenching his body between her knees as he moved his mouth to her neck, to her chest. When she caught his lips again, she accidentally bit the bottom one, made it bleed.

"Sorry," she breathed, then, for the first time, displayed a genuine smile for Tyler, spreading her mouth wide, giving a little laugh before working her way up his jaw-line with her lips to a spot just below his ear, where she tested her teeth, and her tongue, on his flesh delicately.

Tyler paused, remembering the condoms he had bought—but he didn't want to ruin the transformation that had taken place in Brigitte by halting their progress with a mention of contraceptives. He didn't want her to retreat into herself, not when she had actually laughed—actually smiled—moments before. So he ignored common sense and, whispering tender reassurances to Brigitte all the while, got rid of the final barriers between them, and did what he willed.

* * *

_You were right about the fireworks, Ginger, _whispered Brigitte from somewhere deep inside herself as Tyler worked, _But you weren't right about this…this…this is…_ But she had lost her train of thought, Tyler pulling her back to the moment, his voice and his touch heavy anchors to which she was happily tethered by her senses. With more grace than she ever knew she possessed, Brigitte drowned with her back arched, her head flung back. And the wolf inside howled with her pleasure. 

He finished, breathing hard and collapsing his weight carefully onto her. She received his body, let him crush her into the mattress, not caring whether she breathed or not. However, he slid to the side after a moment, grasping her waist and moving her along with him so she lay pressed tightly to his chest, inhaling and exhaling to an intense rhythm. Then she sighed in satisfaction, her eyelids drooping.

"How was that?" Tyler asked, and in reply, Brigitte smirked and skimmed her lips on his breastbone.

"Good?" he pushed, and she rolled her eyes and nodded, smiling. She didn't want to speak and hear the sound of her own voice—she wanted to listen to Tyler's vocalizations, maybe memorize them, before he disappeared from her life. Then maybe she could talk to him once in awhile, too, like she talked to Ginger.

She liked the feel of his arms clutched around her body, the idea that someone could and would want to possess her. She laid her head on his chest, teased the downy hair on his abdomen with her fingers lazily. His touch had become something she wanted not to repel but to receive, and this was a problem…one she had foreseen, had been prepared for.

_It means nothing, _she repeated, again and again inside her head, _it may mean something to him but it means _nothing_ to you._

The seconds, lying there, slipped into minutes, and she felt reenergized, ready for another round. She turned her head to the other side so she could see his face. He was breathing methodically, his eyes fixed on some distant point that didn't exist for Brigitte.

"Tyler," she whispered. He blinked and focused on her.

"What is it, baby?" he asked, letting out a sound that resembled a purr, rumbling deep in his chest. He ran his fingers over the bumps of her vertebrae.

"Can we…can we do that again?" she asked, smiling. She had felt the way Tyler had reacted to her mirth before, and she knew he would not refuse her anything if she could only keep the smile on her face.

He responded by moving suddenly, pinning her to the mattress as he lunged for her neck with his lips. He used his teeth, too, dull but meaningful against her throat.

"You like that?" he whispered, smirking, pulling the white sheet over them like a tent, a cocoon, "You want more?"

Brigitte moaned, long and low, as he ran his hand up her inner thigh, pressing his teeth on her shoulder just hard enough to make lasting marks.

"Yes," she said, "Yes…"

And just as she suspected, Tyler did not deny her what she asked.

* * *

Several hours and equally exhausting sessions later, Tyler could not keep his eyes open for satiated fatigue. They were laying on their sides, facing each other, her breath tickling his neck as the sweat-soaked silk of her negligee stuck between them. He hadn't taken his hands off her since they had started, and Tyler was growing increasingly reluctant to do so at all. He had not expected to feel so possessive once it was over, once he had received his due, but now he foresaw that letting go of frail and beautiful Brigitte was not going to be easy. Why would he want to go back to his former existence—Happier Times, the rushed sexual encounters, the mentality he had embraced when trading drugs for sex and keeping girls imprisoned in his power sphere—when he could maybe have all of her, all of the time? She had seemed desperate to rid herself of his presence before, but then she had smiled—that lovely, uninhibited smile—and everything had changed. And the sex…it had been rather good, even by his high standards, which didn't help in making a case against keeping her. 

_You're already running away—how about some company? _He wanted to ask her this badly, to make suggestions about her future, but Tyler had abruptly shifted places with his conquest. Now he was the one fearing rejection, clutching at her. He wouldn't release her without a fight.

_You shouldn't have to run alone_, he thought, _you should have someone to talk to, someone who will listen. _He knew she talked to herself, which saddened and irritated him at the same time. She was too stubborn to let him into her world. He had a foot in the door—he had made love—and Tyler found himself calling it that without thinking, without correcting himself—to her, had seen her soul flicker in a smile for a second. Forcing himself in the rest of the way would take time, patience, and a little skill.

The skill he possessed, had always possessed because persuasion was part of his nature. He had patience, too, although it proved more difficult to control when Brigitte had balked or made excuses. He could be patient, if there was something he coveted at stake. And time…

_Forget Alice. Forget Happier Times. They've probably searched Edmonton and given up…given up on me, too. She thinks I'm visiting a friend in Calgary, but I can send her a letter of resignation…close up my accounts…hold on to you and disappear. The balance will be upset if I don't go back there, but, hell…fuck that balance. You are my equilibrium. You are what I need to stay sane._

Brigitte had been dozing lightly, and she shifted, squirming closer to his chest, pressing into him.

_I'll protect you, _he promised silently, _I'll take care of you. Please let me care for you, Brigitte. Please, let me love you._

As the words passed through his mind Tyler could not believe them. He had known the strange girl for less than a month and he was clinging to her, professing love. He had said the words before, but he had never meant them…he wasn't even sure, in thinking them to himself, that they held any grain of truth that wasn't influenced by the new bond they shared.

_I am out of my mind,_ he thought, _I'm off my fucking rocker._

Yet there was Brigitte, lying next to him, as real as any person could be. She was real…her problems were real…and Tyler wanted to help her solve them. He could fix her…even if he hadn't been able to fix…

_Shut up, Tyler_, he admonished himself, _shut up. Don't think about that. You can't think of that…not now…not…_

He held tightly onto Brigitte and fell into a fitful sleep.

* * *

Brigitte opened her eyes wide as soon as she felt it was safe. She had been pretending to sleep, biding her time until Tyler drifted off, his shallow breathing deepened to a normal tempo, and his heart slowed and beating out an intriguing rhythm in his chest. She was hot and sweaty and crushed into him, but she wasn't uncomfortable. But neither was it—any of it—what she had expected. She thought of Ginger's recitation of her own sexual encounter, but couldn't find a parallel between the two. It was more like a perpendicular, intersecting only at the point of purpose. 

_You were just a lay to him…a freak, mutant lay. _

It was what she kept telling herself, even after his mid-coital confession, but she was having a hard time believing it, lying next to him.

Extricating herself from his arms, she slunk across the room to the bathroom, taking a moment to retrieve her underwear and to inspect the blood on the white sheets. Another stain for the maids to remove, another quickly jotted entry in the diary of the dirty room. The bed did not reek now, though. It smelled strongly of their specific coupling, and of him.

Unfolding all the towels, she revealed the strips of material she had torn from the Happier Times tee shirt earlier. Snapping a shred of bright yellow cotton taut between her hands, she reasoned they would work well enough. Then, tiptoeing, she snuck back into the main room, where Tyler had taken possession of the whole bed in his sleep, body sprawled across the mattress.

She was wired now, jacked up on sex and coffee, and the wolf within her was restless, thirsty for blood.

Brigitte stopped trying to suppress the sensations her alter ego emitted, and for once let them flow freely into her limbs, instructing her with instinct.

Ginger slid into her vision, but Brigitte ignored her for the moment.

It was not difficult to inch his arms towards the place where the solid wood headboard connected to the metal bed frame. Tying one end of a strip of cloth tightly around Tyler's wrist, she fastened the other end around the slat with as many knots as she could manage. Then she did the same with his other wrist. She did not bother with his ankles. She figured he would be dead before he could protest his imprisonment.

She paused to contemplate Tyler's spread-eagle form.

_You looked like you enjoyed that. _

Ginger sat down in one of the armchairs, waiting, but Brigitte didn't deny or agree to her statement, just crawled back onto the bed. She crouched next to Tyler's side.

_Your eyes—, _said Ginger, _I saw them roll back in your head. I didn't think that was actually humanly possible. _

_Well, _retorted Brigitte_, I didn't just jump the first guy that showed interest. Tyler's got…experience. I picked a good one._

_Heh,_ Ginger snorted_, so that's what you're telling yourself? There's nothing good about him, Brigitte. You'll be doing society a favor, taking this pervert off the map. _

_I always did have better taste in men than you, _smirked Brigitte, ignoring Ginger's previous comment. Ginger snorted again, rolling her eyes. Brigitte, running her hands lightly over Tyler's chest, licked her lips. She had tasted his blood once that night, and was eager to have the red liquor on her tongue again.

_And I have a feeling Tyler is going to taste very, very good.

* * *

_

He dreamed. It was the usual nightmare, starting in the exact same way as always—the snow-covered ground, the roses, dripping blood, the dark deep woods in the distance. However, when it came time for someone to emerge from his front door, the woman who stepped out was not his mother, or the small, dark-haired creature. She was tall and slim with auburn hair, and pale grey eyes. She was speaking as she approached him, narrating in sultry tones, reciting a slow monologue he had never heard before.

_Visualize… the chest…of a stranger…_

A flash—girls from the clinic, girls from college, all rotating around him, laughing. A circle of mockery. Brigitte, staring at him through the glass partition in her door, her teeth bared.

_As his gaze…penetrates you…_

Slim legs propped wide for him, gasps as he entered a girl for the first time. Her fingernails leaving welts in his sides, deep scratches that drew blood on his back.

_Now you are grabbing…what's inside him…_

Screams of ecstasy from those he serviced, quick clutches and tugs, strange canine howls that came from the mouths of girls who suddenly developed wolfish features. Tails…teats…teeth…a taste for human flesh.

_His heart…the meat…the sinewy muscle…_

Claws tearing into his arms, his legs, ripping him apart. Panic. His mother...the red-woman…Brigitte pulling his heart from the cavity she had created, holding it in her hands, studying the way it still tried to beat out a rhythm in the cradle of her palms.

_Does he scream…as you are ripping…his tender flesh?_

His mother...his mother, throwing him to the bed...dead dogs hanging on leashes from the trees, bloody ornaments...his mother, her body…

_Oh…yes…_

He screamed, and screamed and screamed, but the images kept coming, faster and faster, battering his vision until there was only red.

_And his blood…_

_It warms your throat…_

Tyler watched as his body was dragged away, and suddenly it all made sense. The dark haired woman turned and smiled at him—that same soul-smile he had appreciated hours before—as his mother stood next to the redhead, the older woman's arm around the younger woman's shoulders and watched as Brigitte bore him towards the woods and disappeared.

Then the two remaining women turned to look directly at him, and the gold of their eyes glowed viciously against the dark backdrop. The redhead cocked her head, smirking.

_Wake up, sleepyhead,_ she urged, laughing. _It's time._

Tyler's eyes snapped open. He attempted to sit up, but when he tried to move his hands, he found them bound to the bedposts.

"Wha…" he began, but then he heard a little sigh. He turned his head slowly, and into his view came Brigitte. She straddled him, and he felt her weight for the first time as he forced himself awake and into the moment. Her head rested on his chest, and her hands trailed concentric circles on his bare chest, right above the spot where he knew his heart lay, beating a little harderas eachfraction of a second passed.


	9. Chapter 9

_Present_

"Brigitte," Tyler said, failing to keep his voice from rising to an anxious pitch, "What the _fuck_ are you doing?"

He pulled on the restraints she had fastened—they were merely cotton material, and he would be able to slip out of them, if he could just keep her occupied.

Brigitte smiled, her elongated canines glinting in the minimal light, her moon-eyes golden, shining pools in the dark.

"You weren't supposed to wake up," she stated.

Brigitte licked her lips, her tongue passing slowly over both surfaces, making them glisten with saliva. Her right hand was still on his chest, stroking it, her claw-like nails dragging across his skin and making it tingle. Her left hand she had placed on his throat, exerting enough pressure to cause Tyler to swallow compulsively.

"Brigitte…" he began, but she closed her eyes and pushed harder, cutting him off mid-sentence.

"Shhhhh," she said, "Shhhh. It'll all be over soon."

Tyler had shoved his wrist up against the headboard, and was trying fervently to work his hand out of the binding despite the crushing force she applied to his windpipe. Gasping, he felt her hand relax the slightest, allowing him to breathe.

She lowered her head to his, brushing her wet lips against his own before moving south, leaving a trail of kisses along the curve of his jaw, then onto his collarbone and finally onto his chest, where she applied her rough tongue to the skin, moistening it.

"Oh, fuck…" Tyler sputtered, and she warned him to keep still again by stopping short his air supply. His vision was swimming with black spots, but he had slipped the bottom of his hand through the ties—only a few more inches and it would be entirely free and he could defend himself.

She began applying the pinprick of her teeth on his chest, sparingly at first and then with enough fervor to leave deep marks. Her lips curled back into a snarl but she kept her eyes closed. She couldn't look at him. There was still some of Brigitte left after all, Tyler thought, coming to that disconnected conclusion with a great deal of difficulty.

She paused, and reared her head back the slightest, her fangs bared in preparation.

With one last effort, Tyler wrenched his wrist towards the girl about to rip open his chest, and his hand slipped free. Reaching up, he buried his fingers deep in her dark hair and pulled as hard as he could.

Brigitte cried out as he flung her off his body, leaving a trail of superficial scratches across his chest. Tyler sucked in a deep breath and rolled to his right and onto the floor, freeing his other wrist and completely rending the cloth into tatters. It was bright yellow—the remnants of a Happier Times tee shirt the former owner would never miss.

He stumbled forward. As his vision cleared, he stood up slowly and found himself face to face with Brigitte, glaring at him across the expanse of the mussed bed.

"Why'd you have to go and do that?" she spat, rubbing her head and pulling away a stringy clump of hair when she brought her hand back to her side.

"Brigitte," Tyler said, "You need your shit." He had begun edging towards the chair where his jacket was draped, where her purple drug lay snugly in the pocket.

"How the fuck do you know what I _need_," she snarled, "Huh? What makes you think I need anything except to see you dead?"

He had no idea how he would find the needle as she shifted too, narrowing her eyes and starting on her own journey around the bed. She was stalking him, her head low, her shoulders dipping up and down with her predatory movement. She would get there first.

So Tyler stopped, and she stopped, rolling her shoulders back with an audible cracking.

"I can fix you," Tyler offered, "I know what you've got. I can help you, Brigitte."

"Fuck you. You can't fix this…" she said calmly, almost laughing, "If you really knew my problem, then you would know that."

He stepped to the side again, and this time she stood still.

"What, are you trying to get the monkshood?" she asked, folding her arms across her chest, one finger placed in mock-thought on her chin, "Hmmm, well I'm afraid, Tyler, that it won't do you any good. It's too late for that now—it's far too late."

"This isn't you talking…it's…"

"And now you think you know me?" she asked, laughing, "You think just because you fucked me you know me? You know nothing…nothing."

"You're wrong!" he asserted, his eyes traveling to the door. Brigitte stood directly in front of it, and without even looking, she reached behind her and slid the chain into place, the lock from left to right.

"I can't let you leave, Tyler. Or live."

"Brigitte…"

"Shut the fuck up," she hissed, moving forward again, "If you're quiet, I'll do it quickly."

"And if I'm not quiet?"

"I won't hold back. I'll do what you dreamed."

"How…" he began, but she roared for silence and he hushed.

"You talk in your sleep," she explained, then smiled wickedly, "You said lots of things Tyler…lots of things. About women in red, about roses…about your mother… How was she Tyler? Was she gentle with you, like you were with me?"

"Fuck you," Tyler snarled, "Don't…"

But Brigitte cut him off mid-protest.

"Or did she hurt you,_ baby_? Given the way you screamed when I tried to touch you, the answer is obvious. And I thought I was the one with problems," Brigitte said, smirking. She reached the chair and the jacket, Tyler standing motionless in her wake.

"We're messed up, you and me," she said, "We could've made a good team. But the position of my mate has already been filled…or have you forgotten the attack at Happier Times, the grey monster at the window?"

"I remember," he murmured.

"Well then you'll probably be interested to know that he's on his way," she said, "And he's pissed. My scent has changed…he knows you took me, Tyler, and now he wants revenge."

"It would kill me," he said, eliciting a nod from Brigitte.

"Yes, he would tear you apart without so much as an afterthought. Now, here's a question for you—would you rather lie prone, whimpering, as some once-human beast chews on your intestines—or would you rather let me slip you a little bit of this poison"—here she held up the vial of monkshood, shaking it for emphasis—"and take your last breath on the bed, with me holding you?"

"I don't want to die," Tyler insisted, but Brigitte shook her head.

"That's not an option. The easy way, or the hard way—those are your only choices. Sound familiar?"

Tyler swore.

"I didn't do anything to you that creature wasn't going to do eventually," he said quietly, "But I never hurt you deliberately, Brigitte, not like he will. I may not understand you, Brigitte, but I understand what its like to be violated."

"Your own mother…" Brigitte murmured, and Tyler thought he caught a hint of sympathy in her voice.

"Yes. I would never wish that terror on anyone, Brigitte, especially not you."

"You want to talk about terror, huh?" she shouted suddenly, "I killed my own fucking sister. A knife between her ribs—but it wasn't really her I killed, not any more. It was…"

"It was the same thing," Tyler tried to reason, despite his shock at her confession, "That held my parents captive, that ruined my life…it ruined yours, too. That's why you left suburbia and struck out for the big city…well, so did I."

"How can you be sure?" asked Brigitte, "How can you be sure we're talking about the same affliction?"

Tyler pointed to the purple drug in Brigitte's grasp.

"My mother used to inject it all the time. After my father left, she started killing dogs left and right, coming home at dawn with their blood on her hands. And after awhile, her eyes…" He paused, meeting Brigitte's golden gaze, "They were yellow, just like yours."

Brigitte was examining the vial, held firmly between her thumb and forefinger.

"I always knew there had to be…others…others like me…people who tried to live with it… Well, she went beserk, and then she raped you," she stated, "And then?"

"And then she put a bullet in her brain."

"Ah," said Brigitte, "See what I have to look forward to?"

"She made it sixteen years, Brigitte, before she lost it…probably longer. Who knows how or when she got infected…who knows—my father could still be out there, living a normal life."

"Or he could be the one that's after me now. Or," she added, "The one that bit my sister, and then got flattened by a fucking truck."

"It's possible," said Tyler, trying to keep the emotion from his voice, "The point is—they tried. They tried to make it work."

"What are you suggesting? That you and I shack up and 'try to make it work'?"

Most notions of running off with the woman before him had fled when he realized what she was, what she would become if he didn't get her under control again. Tyler stuttered out a response.

"No…I…"

"Ha," said Brigitte, pursing her lips, "Didn't think so. You got what you wanted from me. Unfortunately in doing so, you got a little more than you bargained for in return."

"You didn't infect me Brigitte," Tyler said, hoping it was the truth. Except for the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, the pounding in his temples, he didn't feel any different than usual.

"No," she reasoned, lowering her weapon for a moment, thinking, "No, I suppose not. Not if your parents were both wolves before they had you…and if you were going to contract it, you would have gotten it from mommy dearest a long time ago…but then…what? You're clearly not a wolf, so what the hell are you?"

As she stood, gazing off into the distance, contemplating the complicated answer to her own question, Tyler inched to the side, placing his foot in a position to vault to the side, across the bed. In a split second, though, her eyes trained back on his form.

"What are you, Tyler?" she whispered, cocking her head in a distinctly canine fashion.

But Tyler wasn't sure how to categorize himself.

"Immune, maybe. A carrier," he offered cautiously, then murmured, "A friend." She plowed on, however, and didn't acknowledge his hopeful addition.

"Makes sense," Brigitte murmured, nodding, lost in the biology of it all. "Even with AIDS, there's a chance it won't transfer from the mother to the child."

"You're comparing this to a sexually transmitted disease?" Tyler asked incredulously.

"Merely drawing parallels," Brigitte said.

She had begun moving towards him again, had popped the cover off the needle.

"This is, of course," she said, smiling, "Much more dangerous."

"Why don't you use that needle on yourself," he suggested gently, "And let me help you?"

"Why don't you make your choice? Or do I have to repeat them?"

Tyler stared at Brigitte as she crept closer. Her face had taken on a haggard appearance, and she looked like she had before the hotel—fatigued, irritated, on edge.

She was right—he did not know her at all. He hadn't seen this coming, but instead let himself get tangled up in their transaction, in the moments that followed. He knew she was crazy, but he had vaguely hoped that it was a harmless kind of crazy. He had been wrong.

"I choose the hard way." He said this without hesitation, but with a great deal of fear coursing through his veins. The world before him was still a little blurry, the dark corners of his vision keeping him from fully evaluating the situation.

"How long do you think you can keep me in here, Brigitte?" Tyler tried, desperate, "He make be coming, but he could be hours away."

"Oh I assure you," she said, shoving the needle into the vial through the rubber top, "He's close."

"Christ," Tyler said, "Fuck."

She began moving again, stepping confidently towards him, so Tyler backed up—right into the nightstand. He considered jumping up on the bed and trying for the door, but she would be upon him before he could undo the locks. He raised his fists, preparing to fight back should she try to land a blow, vaguely wishing he had a lacrosse stick. As it was, he didn't look too intimidating, not when she was the aggressor, that hazy gold look in her eyes.

"You gonna hit me, _baby_?" she asked, stressing the pet name as if it burned her tongue, "I'd like to see you try." And without another word, she began the assault.

She leapt forward and they crashed in a mass of flesh into the fragile nightstand. The lamp tottered and fell to the floor, shattering into small pieces of porcelain, the light bulb flickering for an instant before it went out. Tyler recovered quickly, but she was quicker. She was on her feet again, ready, while he still staggered to stand.

She shoved him into the wall, his body making a dull thud against the plaster, his bare foot snagging on the broken lamp and opening a deep gash just below his ankle, where all the veins clustered at the surface of his skin. His vision flooded with the color red as Brigitte slammed her form into him again, digging her claws into the flesh of his chest as she made contact, tearing upwards with a howl. Pain consumed him, and he screamed, putting his hand to the open wounds as if he could stop the blood from flowing with his touch. She retreated and returned, choosing fresh flesh to desecrate. She dug into his thighs, pulling sideways as she withdrew her claws.

He screamed, the unnatural pitch of his voice astounding him even as the cries left his mouth. Brigitte, lapping the blood from the back of one hand, backed off momentarily. Her eyes glared back at him from the gloom, accusing him of crimes he hadn't—couldn't have—prevented.

"Please," he whimpered, leaning into the corner, "Brigitte, please…"

She grabbed him about the waist and turned him towards the wall, yanking hard on his right arm. Tyler felt the sickening pop as she dislocated his shoulder. His scream dissolved into sharp, pained breaths.

She would render him helpless, limb by limb, until she met no further resistance.

Brigitte breathed down his neck as she latched onto the flesh just below his hairline with her teeth, her claws entering his lower back dangerously close to his spine.

Tyler crumpled to the floor as she released him again. He slumped into a pool of blood that had accumulated, gasping, praying she would halt her torture.

"Are you satisfied?" she snarled into his ear, "Do you want more of that, or some of this."

Tyler was vaguely aware of her holding the needle in front of his face, but he was mostly concerned with stopping his blood from completely soaking the carpet. Small but deadly punctures covered his body, too many to stop with his clumsy fingers.

"Brigitte," he said, his eyes closing. He forced them open again, as she pulled him to a standing position by tugging on his bad shoulder.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," Tyler hissed through clenched teeth, trying to keep from biting off his own tongue.

Guiding him back to the bed, she threw him down onto the mattress, dragging her nails deep along his side for good measure as he fell. When Tyler blinked up at his attacker, he saw his mother, not Brigitte, approaching him with the needle.

"Mom," he said, "Mom, please."

"I'm not your fucking mother," the figure said coldly, returning to her proper form, small and vicious. Brigitte was still standing there, clad in the negligee, the greed in her eyes growing. And arching her back, she threw her head back and howled.

Tyler cringed as she filled the room with her canine calls, summoning the remainder of his strength as she summoned her unwelcome suitor to the door, beckoning him to come in and finish what she had started.

"You wanted chaos, baby," she said, "Try to control this."

As soon as the words left her mouth she sprang for him again, but Tyler was ready. He rolled to the side just as she was about to make contact. She hit the mattress instead with a muffled growl. And although it took her little time to scramble back to her feet, it was enough for Tyler to get off the bed and hobble towards the door.

"No," Brigitte snarled, "No. You were not meant to leave this place!"

His hand was on the lock. He struggled with the chain, the cool metal sliding at his touch, but he could not focus. The catch kept slipping back down. He forced it up again, watched it fall before he could move it left.

Her claws tore through his shirt, into his shoulders, again. She whispered something in his ear that he could not hear, could not understand. Then she pulled his body back, sent it with incredible force to meet the heavy door. The impact, the pain destroyed what little strength he had left. Tyler scrabbled with his fingers on the slick surface, unable to stop himself from falling. The raspy sounds of his desperate breaths, his weak attempts to pick himself up, his mewed pleas for mercy—these were the last things Tyler remembered before his eyes fell shut, pitching him into the dark woods of his dreams.

* * *

The pain woke Tyler again only minutes later, but Brigitte had made quick work of his escape attempts. She had dragged his body to the side and barricaded the door with both of the armchairs. He was now lying prone in the middle of the floor, his hands tied behind his back, his feet bound. She wasn't taking any chances this time. 

She had redressed in her normal clothes and commandeered his duffel bag for her own possessions, probably picking and choosing what things of his to keep for herself. Brigitte was in the process of placing her camera safely in the bag when she noticed his miniscule movements. She turned, tried to force a sick smile onto her face, and failed. The grimace she displayed was just as frightening to Tyler, though, as she knelt down beside him.

"Still alive, eh?" she asked. She stood, went about her preparations as he writhed about on the floor, trying to free his left hand while pain shot up his right arm, still hanging precariously from the shoulder socket. He continued to bleed freely from several of the deeper punctures, but some of the smaller had begun to mend.

She paused, stooped over so she could see the colors of his bruised skin, ran her fingers over the scarring wounds.

"Shit," she muttered, and disappeared from his view again. When she returned she sighed heavily and began manipulating his form until he was on his knees, sitting back on his haunches, his arms still tied. She crouched directly behind him, and Tyler didn't have the strength of will to turn and look at her.

"I was hoping you would've died from blood loss," Brigitte murmured, "But apparently you've got the diseased genes after all. You're healing, and even faster than I thought possible."

She ran her hands up over his arms, skimming his shoulders until they reached either side of his throat.

"I'm going to have to break your neck," Brigitte stated.

Tyler, tired of her games, unable to fight back, grew angry.

_After everything you've done for her…in exchange for so little…and now you have to die for all ways anyone has every wronged her…judgment day, my ass. What happened to justice being blind…what happened to sweetly shy Brigitte, my little sexually repressed passenger, shrinking into the seat..._

_A wolf, _he thought_, she was a wolf all along…and that means she's been plotting murder, at least since the border when we were interrupted…and you fell for it, you fucking imbecile._

_Never could resist the virgins, _his conscience chided. _This is what you get for being a cherry hound…for thinking you could ever fuck away your memories. Some end to some fucking miserable life, Tyler. What a way to go._

Tyler's eyelids dropped, shutting himself away from the scene of his demise.

"Do it," he said weakly, "Do it."

"You don't deserve to live for what you put all those girls through, what you put me through," she qualified, very quiet, sliding one hand to the top of his head, the other just under his chin.

"Then fucking kill me already," Tyler said through the pain, holding his body still, waiting.

* * *

Brigitte sat behind her victim, her hands in place for the final quick twist, the severance of the spine, the slump of his corpse back into her embrace. The fingers of her left hand lay splayed in his thick blond hair; the fingers of her right caressed the beginnings of a three o'clock shadow on his trembling chin. His jaw was set, but he could not keep from shaking. His body shuddered against hers involuntarily, as if he were only cold without a shirt, not about to die. 

"Do it," he spoke again, but although he was right there, Tyler sounded far away, already half-gone.

She took her time, studying the way his frenzied breaths brought his chiseled shoulder blades up and down, the way the wounds stood out lividly against his fair skin. Then she looked up and saw that they were facing the large mirror on the wall.

He had his eyes closed, screwed them shut to block out the image of himself under her influence, at her mercy. His teeth were clenched, and his cheeks were wet. As she watched, a tear issued from the corner of one eye, slid on a slippery course down to the edge of his jaw. On impulse she leaned over his shoulder and dragged her tongue over the spot where it had dissolved, _tasting_ the salt of his flesh.

The wolf within flared, its sensations threatening to overtake her own, to cause her carefully controlled limbs to complete her calling before she wanted to finish it. She brought her gaze to the mirror, but this time she focused on herself.

Brigitte was draped over the man before her, holding him captive with her entire being, her flushed cheek pressed to his. She could see the malformations of her blossoming body, her brittle claws cupping his chin, her pointed ears protruding from her disheveled dark hair, her sharp teeth as she panted, her eyes like full moons in the shadowed night of her face.

She blinked and found that Ginger had joined her, leaning her head on the other side of Tyler's so she was staring, like Brigitte, at their reflections in the mirror.

_Looking for something, B? _

_Yeah, my humanity, _Brigitte thought.

_It's gone, B. Look at yourself, _Ginger muttered, smiling, _Ready to end this sorry son-of-a-bitch's life and doubting the influence the wolf has over you. There's no turning back now. You may still look vaguely like the girl, B, but you metamorphosed into the monster a long, long time ago. _

_No turning back,_ Brigitte thought, and the finality of that statement struck her like a bolt of lightning to the brain.

_This is the path that has been laid out for you…the one you thought you had to choose. But you were wrong. You do not have to kill this man, Brigitte. Why? Because killing him is not going to stop it. It is not going to make it go away or get better. These ideas of justice and mercy are not going to put you on a higher plane than the beasts—once you are gone, you are gone. You will not be absolved of your sins, nor will you be able to forget them. Do this, and _then _there will be no turning back—then there will be no way to stop yourself from descending into the madness—not the monkshood, not anything._

_Let him go. He will heal in time and push you to the back of his mind with the other bad memories. And then…run. Run to the ends of the earth if you have to, through the night—your only friends fragments of your imagination, your only sanctuary the darkness from whence you came. _

"What are you waiting for Brigitte?" bellowed Tyler, ripping her thoughts back to reality with a tear in his voice.

She looked at him again, his handsome body destroyed, his handsome face distorted in agony.

The wolf recognized its opportunity in the moment of indecision, made her muscles move against her human will. Her hands trembled, jerked, and she felt Tyler gasp, draw in what he thought was to be his parting breath. One swift movement, and it would all be over.

But even though she was shy and often afraid, Brigitte had always been the stronger sister. She had always been able to resist when mere mortals would have given into the bloodlust, the lure of a moral freedom for which every human's inner beast longed.

The struggle was visible as she forced her hands away, down to her sides. The wolf inside, realizing defeat, sent shooting pains through her limbs, in her back and chest. She crumpled, curled into herself.

Tyler, breathing heavily, had felt the pressure of her fingers disappear, and now his eyes were open and watching her via the mirror, wild.

Brigitte's own tears were heavy and fell freely from her eyes as she freed his feet, his hands. Flexing his limbs, Tyler took a moment to collect himself before doing as Brigitte expected.

He turned on her, fury written on his face, and she shrank back and waited for him to resume the one-sided tussle. This time it would be in his favor. She would not fight back.

He hit her hard across the cheek, knocking her to the floor. She cried out but didn't move from where she had fallen backwards, just let him hit her again from above, with as much force as he could summon in his weakened state.

But when he raised his fist the third time, Tyler's blow fell flat, barely glanced her shoulder. He lifted his foot, made as if he were going to kick her, but set it back down mid-gesture.

"It's all right," she hissed, "It's okay. Keep going. Don't stop until I'm dead."

Tyler caught her with those blue eyes, cold as the snowstorm that had begun to rage outside.

"Maybe I will," he said.

"I was wrong," she offered, "I was the one never meant to check out."

She wrestled the wolf, holding her inner-demon captive with her strength of will alone. She remembered the needle. Tyler was standing there, stuck between dealing her another blow and running.

"Inject me," she murmured, "Inject me with all three doses. Do it quickly, before I lose control again."

Tyler regarded her for a moment, and then drew his gaze to where she had arranged the two extra vials and the full needle on the bed in a neat little row.

"This could kill you."

"I know," Brigitte whispered, "You'll be doing society a favor."

"Brigitte…" He frowned, shook his head.

"You can leave me here alive and let the monster have me, or you can…put me to sleep…like the lapdog I am. You have the right to choose my fate…you have the right to my life."

Tyler nodded, acknowledging the truth of that statement. Two days later, and they were back where they had begun—her owing him everything.

"You would rather die than become one of them?" he asked.

"Yes," said Brigitte.

"What if you survive…what then?"

"I pick myself and move on, as if the last month of my life had never transpired."

"Running?"

"Running," she confirmed sadly. "I thought once that someday I would find a place to stop…I suppose here, if I die, is as good as any."

Tyler looked at her, and his harsh glare from his eyes softened the slightest.

"Get up," he said.

She obeyed carefully, keeping her distance. But Tyler approached her with docility, his arm hanging limply from his dislocated shoulder.

"Help me fix this," he commanded, and she did, yanking on his hand with all her strength. Tyler swore as the joint popped back into place.

"Christ," he said, rolling his shoulder, "That fucking hurts."

"I imagine," said Brigitte, remembering what Ginger had done to Sam, the memory still vivid in her mind despite the distance, the time, the death that had come between them.

Tyler jerked his chin towards the bed, and she went over to sit on it among the rumpled covers. He pulled a chair away from the door and sat next to the bed, giving the needle an expert tap to expel any air bubbles that might have been trapped inside.

"What's the magic word?" he asked in all seriousness, poising the needle above her proffered arm.

Brigitte, ducking her head in submission, whispered it.

"Please," she said, and she meant it more than he knew.

Taking her arm, he made quick work of the first dose, following with the others in swift succession, sending the drug into her system. The purple sentinel struck off on its journey through her veins, and almost instantly, the wolf recoiled, snarled, made its objections known. As Brigitte convulsed, Tyler laid her down, put a pillow under her head, procured the ancient toothbrush from the duffle bag and held it in front of her face until she could open her maw and clamp down on it with razor teeth. However, before she did so, Brigitte looked up and into Tyler's eyes.

"What are you going to do?"

"Wait," he said, simply, climbing onto the bed beside her, arranging himself in a propped up position to keep pressure off his bad shoulder, "If…if you die, I'll take your body somewhere and bury it. Then be on my way."

Brigitte nodded with difficulty.

"And what will you do if I wake up?" she said, straining to keep her fix in check as the monkshood invaded her every move, her every thought.

"_If_ you wake up, Brigitte," Tyler said, taking her hand, "Who knows."

He sighed heavily, closed his eyes.

"How about," he said, applying a gentle pressure to her palm, "We cross that bridge when we come to it."

And with that assurance, Brigitte let herself fall into the fix, let the darkness envelope her in its maternal embrace and bring her to the brink. She stood on the cliff edge of her life and watched as the sea of her struggle rolled below her, and it did not matter any more whether she lived or died because she knew, either way, that she was safe.


	10. Chapter 10

_Brigitte watched as her body bucked on the bed, Tyler trying to hold her still and failing. Her moon-eyes had rolled back, revealing the whites, empty of everything. He had placed one of the bright yellow strips of cloth in her mouth to keep her from swallowing her tongue, had gasped when her physique had started to alter into that of the beast in warp-speed._

_But although the wolf tried to combat the purple assailant by urging the transformation on faster, faster, Brigitte's body was not meant to be a battleground. She was dying as the disease tried in vain to save her, changing her beyond recognizable means, but too late. _

_She began to resemble her pursuer in form, buckling into a hunchbacked beast with too long limbs and a malformed muzzle. Her clothes, shredded, did not hide the dusk-colored fur that sprang up in patches on her skin. But her back was still bare, smooth, and so were her breasts and the curve of her neck. Her fingers were still articulate, her thumbs still opposable. She froze three-quarters of the way between woman and wolf and breathed her last shuddering breath as Tyler looked on in wonder. _

_Brigitte followed his hands as he explored her body, his fingers lingering on the line of nipples that had sprung from her abdomen, the stub of a tail that had sprouted from her spine. He ran his smooth thumbs over the wrinkles in her face, skewed in a permanent snarl. Then he pulled the lids down to cover the dead white of her eyes._

_When Tyler opened the door it had stopped snowing, leaving only a dusting on the ground that lay before him. He had wrapped her body as best he could in both sheets and the comforter, leaving the bed bare and without meaning—she would take everything they had done there, together, with her to the grave. Tyler laid her in the back seat of his car and drove away, leaving a do not disturb sign on the door. _

_Brigitte traveled with him, a shade in the front seat, a murmur in his immediate memory. She saw how the scratches on his face had healed into red lines, the teeth marks on his neck into pearl dots. She had left her mark upon him in many ways, none of which his lycanthrope blood—or his ways in the world—could completely erase. His eyes were clear and focused straight ahead, but his arms were tense, his hands gripping the wheel with immediacy._

_He was going to bury her in a vacant field somewhere in Saskatchewan, where only the solemn, cawing crows that perched in the trees would bear witness. But even with the sharp spade he found in a nearby barn, the ground was too hard to dig into. He looked lost for a moment, unsure of what to do with her body, the bedclothes billowing around it like earthbound clouds in the wind._

_Tyler walked to and from the barn, gathering armfuls of hay and piling them in the field. He stopped to contemplate the mound, onto which he placed her stiff body. Then he went to the car and came back with an old cigarette lighter, one he had kept in his kit in case there was some substance one of his girls wanted to smoke. He looked at it for a moment, then placed it in his jacket pocket. _

_Arranging her corpse, Tyler uncovered her transformed face and contemplated it for a moment before covering it up again. He kept the new, frightening visage hidden in order to stop the picture he held within his mind of Brigitte, wholly human save her yellow eyes, from fading away._

_Watching from some place Brigitte could not name, she saw as Tyler crouched over her body, producing the lighter._

"_I'm sorry I couldn't keep you," was all he said before igniting the pyre._

_Brigitte closed her eyes and did not open them until the man had gone off into the sunrise, and all that remained of the monster she had become were smoking blue-black ashes.

* * *

_

_Present_

There were sounds first—slow breathing, soft sighs, a man's voice singing off-key on the other side of time. Screams of pain, screams of pleasure. Snickers. Heavy-handed silence.

Then her other senses returned, slowly but surely. The taste of blood in her mouth, her own and bittersweet. The feel of the sheets covering her, a pressure on her left hand. The smell of his flesh, sweet.

And then Brigitte's eyelids fluttered, rose to reveal the world she had thought she had lost.

She was alive. She moved her fingers, her toes, arched her back and stretched as if she had just woken up from a long repose.

The man who had been lying beside her, clutching her hand, withdrew it in astonishment. It was the same man from the vision—fair skinned, flawed.

"Tyler," she spoke tentatively, and thought she saw something like relief in his eyes.

She sat up and looked across the room to the mirror, expecting to find some evidence that her vision of her own destruction had been at least a half-truth, but her reflection had not changed. Her eyes were still yellow. She smoothed her hair back behind her ears and found that they still possessed points. Claws, teeth—they were there to remain, she assumed. But in exchange for her life, these minor defects on her person were of little consequence.

"How do you feel?" he asked.

"Wicked," said Brigitte, taking the words out of her dead sister's mouth and relishing the sound of them.

"'Wicked' as in, 'I'm going to beat the shit out of you again, Tyler?' or 'Wicked', as in…okay?"

She turned to look at him over her shoulder, smiling sadly.

"As in, I think I'm fucking lucky to have survived that triple dose."

"Are you…are you…?" He looked hopeful.

"No," Brigitte said, "To be cured is to die. And I'm still very much alive. But I'm in control, for now."

Tyler fidgeted, reaching out as if he were going to take her hand again, but then retracting it.

"I tried to hold you still, but—but I just couldn't…your eyes, they were…"

"It's okay, Tyler," Brigitte said, "It's okay."

Tyler swallowed, nodded.

"Christ, I'm sorry I hit you. I'm sorry I even thought about hitting you."

"Tyler," Brigitte said, "I nearly _killed_ you. Your reaction was reasonable…and I…I should be the one asking for forgiveness. I didn't mean most of the things I said…"

"Which means you meant some of them," he countered. "Which ones?"

"About you and me…being messed up…about not being able to fix this…well, not without putting a gun in my mouth and pulling the trigger, anyway. Your mother…she must have been an incredibly strong woman to end her life."

"I thought so," said Tyler quietly, "Part of me wishes she would have done it sooner. Part of me wishes,"—and here his tone wavered—"that she would have shot me too."

"Was it bad?" asked Brigitte, and the sympathy in her voice was unmistakable.

"It was—" Tyler began, stopped, blinked slowly several times before beginning again, "It was like she _had _killed me. I couldn't think about anything else…it consumed me every minute of every day until I thought I would go crazy. And then I started in with the girls, fucking and fucking. It helped. I don't know how, but it helped. But I never felt a thing."

Brigitte nodded, inviting him to continue.

"I got the job at the care facility and things started to turn around…I was in control again, but then I got that same old sensation, like nothing mattered, had ever mattered. So…the girls, again. Things were looking up…"

"Then they brought me in," said Brigitte, "Fresh meat."

"So I thought," Tyler said. "And boy, was I mistaken…for the most part."

Brigitte gave a short laugh, looked shyly into her lap.

"You're a strange kind of creature, Brigitte," said Tyler, "And that intrigued me."

"The lycanthrope blood probably helped," said Brigitte, shifting away, standing. "It's probably why you were so eager to get into my pants. Wolves attract other…wolves."

Tyler didn't confirm or deny her suspicion, just shrugged, wincing mid-gesture.

"Speaking of canine copulation," he said, rubbing his shoulder, "You mentioned something about wolf-boy being close. That was hours ago."

She cranked open the window, letting in a cold blast of air, standing and inhaling the wind through flared nostrils.

"It's snowing west of here, too. It slowed him down, but he's persistent. Single-minded, you might say." She shut the window, turned to face Tyler.

"You can tell all that from a little sniff?"

"Yes," she said, "I know his scent. It's become all too familiar."

"Has he ever, gotten, you know..." Tyler asked, looking strangely embarrassed.

"Close to fucking me? Once. Right after I realized I was his idea of a good time. He had me on the ground, was standing over me, panting, in an alleyway in Edmonton, but then a car backfired a block away and it spooked him. He hadn't gotten used to the city yet. He's become a lot more difficult to deter since then."

"He can really tell that we had sex?" Tyler asked, "You weren't bluffing even the slightest?"

Brigitte folded her arms across her chest.

"You basically marked me as your territory by sticking it to me," she said wryly, a sarcastic grin flashing on her lips for a moment, "Oh, he knows. He knows my scent just as well I know his. Your smell—the things we did—you're all over me, Tyler."

"Then why'd you let it happen?" Tyler asked, "Why did you give in to the wolf?"

"Because I wanted to," said Brigitte, her voice low, "I…you're not the only one who was intrigued, Tyler."

"But you knew the entire time that you were going to kill me."

"Not the entire time. Only when I realized that getting rid of you meant I would actually have to end your life. And even then, I didn't _want _to kill you Tyler. I thought I needed to."

"You were wrong."

"Yes," said Brigitte, "I was very wrong."

"You could have warned me…you could have said something."

"What?" asked Brigitte, looking him square in the eye, "'Tyler, I'd be really obliged if you could get your mind out of the gutter for five minutes and help me get out of this mess. Also, I'm a werewolf, and if I don't dispose of you after you've so unselfishly aided my escape, my crazy lycanthrope lover will.' Hmmm? You would have thought I was fucking nuts."

"Aren't you?"

"Yes," said Brigitte, "But I'm not alone in that accolade."

Tyler sighed deeply, frowned. He got up, testing his legs. Brigitte noticed that all of his visible gashes had knit themselves shut. He seemed to have recovered his senses and balance well enough after the beating she had given him, and Brigitte wondered vaguely if Tyler had discovered his unnatural healing abilities before, or if he was as unaware of his own special condition as he appeared.

He began to pace on the opposite side of the bed, lost in his own thoughts.

Brigitte perched in the chair in front of the door, fixed her gaze on a distant point and didn't say anything. She was content in that moment to be sitting there, feeling life in her limbs. The wolf was not gone, but buried, and it felt wonderful to be free—if only for a fraction of time—from her dual consciousness.

After a while spent in silence, Tyler halted in his tracks and turned to face her, a determined air to his movement.

"So what are we going to do about it?" he asked.

"About what?" returned Brigitte, raising an eyebrow.

"_It_. The wolf."

Brigitte rested her head on her arm and watched him continue to stride across the room in one direction, back again. He was brimming with potential energy—give him a push in the right direction, and she could either spare him or further incriminate him. He acted as if it was his decision, but Brigitte knew his fate truly lay in her hands. She was still blocking the doorway, after all, lounging in the chair and looking at him from the odd angle. He might have been pulling something, trying to act tough, or he might have been sincere. The only way to differentiate between the two was to offer him a way out. She was sure he would take it.

"I suggest," said Brigitte, "That you reclaim your stuff and get the hell outta here. Whatever happens, it isn't going to be pretty."

"I can handle carnage, I can handle blood. I'm not squeamish."

"I know, Tyler," Brigitte said, "But it's not only the death of this creature you have to contemplate—it's our deaths as well. We could both die, trying to stop this thing. If you don't go now, you may never get another chance."

Tyler looked at her long and hard, studying her wild countenance. Hers was a face that both asked him to stay and cried for him to flee. She couldn't control the way her features conveyed both longing and loathing, she couldn't make her eyes declare one or the other.

"Brigitte, _baby,_" Tyler said, finally, running his hands through his hair and giving a half-smile, "If I were going _anywhere_, don't you think I would have left by now?"

Brigitte felt a swell of something that she wasn't sure how to define in her breast, and wanted to get up and go to him, embrace him, kiss him. But she restrained her emotions, kept her human urges in check. She couldn't afford to get carried away again, not when there was still so much at stake for them both.

Sighing, Brigitte returned the subdued smile, stretched again.

"Got any suggestions?"

* * *

They finished packing the remainder of their things into the one duffel bag, and as they left the room, Tyler reached back in for a moment to take the "Do Not Disturb" from the inside knob and transfer it to where the maid would see it hanging, a bright orange placard against the cream-colored door. 

"I pity whoever the hell has to clean that up," said Tyler as he got into the car. Brigitte slid into the passenger seat and slammed the door against the brutal wind that was blowing outside. She shivered in the chilly interior even though she was wearing the new jacket. Tyler let the engine warm up before cranking on the heat. When he turned the knob to let in the warm air, he smiled as Brigitte immediately pulled her hands from her pockets and placed them over the vents.

"I would have assumed you were more tolerant of the cold," he said. Her only response was to blow a very visible breath and then take to rubbing her hands together.

Tyler drove, keeping his eyes peeled against the storm for the place where they would make their stand. They drove through barren farmland, the snow blowing off the fields and across the road in snaking formations even as more fell from the sky.

He had just turned off onto a smaller road when Brigitte stopped trying to warm herself up and squinted ahead.

"What's that?"

Slowing down as his headlights cut against a solid stone structure ahead, Tyler copied Brigitte.

"It's an underpass," he said as they rolled into the opening and darkness enveloped them. Brigitte inhaled quickly and did not exhale until they had passed through to the other side.

"It's perfect," she said, turning to look back into the tunnel.

Dawn was just breaking as Tyler parked the car on the shoulder, knocking off a few more chunks of frozen asphalt as the vehicle dipped down to the gravel. Brigitte got out and he watched her scent the air, her arms crossed and her back to the wind.

Climbing back inside, she did not both to stop at her customary seat. She merely maneuvered directly over the stick shift and onto Tyler's lap.

He let her rearrange herself, unbuttoning his coat so she could press her body directly to his chest. He wrapped his arms around her, kissed her forehead before she buried her face in the crook of his neck.

"He's coming," Brigitte said, her lips brushing his skin as she spoke, "He's only about ten miles away now."

Tyler kissed the curve of her jaw, the tip of her pointed ear.

"Now all we have to do," she murmured, "Is wait."

Outside the car, the wind howled.

Tyler turned off the car twenty minutes later to save the battery, but Brigitte wasn't shivering any more. She was snug and solid leaning into him, her eyes closed. She hadn't said anything else—just breathed—and Tyler didn't want to interrupt their reverie with meaningless words.

He was brimming with questions, however, that sooner or later, he knew, would spill from his mouth.

_She seems sorry but how can I be sure? _he thought. _Why the fuck am I cradling her like a child when she just threatened to break my neck? Why am I waiting with her for the wolf to come when I know it could be the end for the both of us? Why do I even trust her at all?_

_Because_, the voice in his head replied, _because she trusted you to get her out, to get her away from that place. And you told her you wouldn't try to run away and she believed you._

"I never took you for the cuddling type," he blurted out, and Brigitte opened her brilliant eyes to look up at him.

"I never took you for someone who would let himself get this caught up with a girl," Brigitte retorted, tilting her chin up to offer her mouth for a kiss. Tyler accepted the invitation.

"Am I that transparent?" he asked after, laughing.

"Only since we had sex," she said, closing her eyes again, "Now I can read you like a book."

"Unfortunate side-effects indeed," he smirked.

"Have you always had those healing abilities?" Brigitte questioned, running a fingertip across one the puckering flesh of one of his scars.

"I'd never really thought about it before…but even in all those years of playing lacrosse, I never broke anything. Not even my nose, which half of my teammates must have done in the quarterfinal game junior year alone. I took plenty of spills. Thought I had torn a ligament once, but the day I was due at the doctor's office I woke up and was perfectly fine."

"It's in the blood," she said, "The disease protects you. It isn't foolproof—if it were there would be a hell of a lot more full-fledged wolves running around—but minor cuts, bruises—those heal almost immediately. That's why I've got scars up and down my arms—I tracked it. The closer he got to me, the faster I healed. My presence must have accelerated the process for you, too."

"Hmm."

"You seemed to have reaped all the benefits, Tyler," she said, "Without suffering any of the consequences of the disease."

"And any children I might have…" he said, and when she opened her eyes to regard him, he quickly corrected himself. "I mean, hypothetically speaking, of course—would my children get the diseased genetics and have the same abilities?"

"Who knows," said Brigitte, "If you're a mutation, then maybe. If you're a carrier, they could end up like me and your mother. Monsters."

"You're not a monster, Brigitte. You are currently performing the duties of a lap dog very well."

"Your ass must be freezing," she chuckled.

"A little bit." He paused and put forth the next question carefully.

"But don't you want children someday?"

Brigitte frowned.

"I don't think I would want to force what you had to go through on another human being willingly. It would be unfair."

"It was okay for awhile," Tyler said, "They held things together for a long time. Probably as long as they could."

"I don't think I'd make a very good mother," said Brigitte, "My mother tried way too hard and ruined everything for all of us."

"But didn't you love her?"

"Yes, I loved her. I was supposed to hate her like my sister did, but how could I? She was my mother, and I couldn't blame her for trying to be what she thought was a good parent. She just…didn't go about it the right way."

Brigitte paused, and turned to look out the window for a moment.

"I was supposed to do a lot of things," she whispered, "That I could never follow through on."

"Thank goodness for that," Tyler said, swallowing compulsively. She turned back and stroked his throat.

"Roll down the window, will you?" she requested, "I need to catch his scent again."

Tyler opened the window a crack. A blast of cold air forced itself through the tiny space, and she inhaled sharply. Then she moved her head towards the glass, taking little short sniffs as she went.

She drew back suddenly, her eyes wide.

"Less than a mile now," she breathed as Tyler rolled the window back up. She started to shift back into the passenger seat, but Tyler held onto her hips in protest.

"Don't…don't go out there Brigitte," he said, "We can drive all night and…"

"He'd never find us?" asked Brigitte. "He'd always find us, Tyler—make no mistake about that. The only thing that stops it is death. You know that just as well as I do."

"But…"

"Let me go, Tyler," she said, gently, cupping his chin in her palm. "Let me go."

Tyler sighed. He slowly released his hands, and she was soon sitting alongside him, gripping the door handle.

"You really think this is gonna work?" he asked.

"It has to," said Brigitte.

"I'm coming, too," said Tyler, but she shook her head.

"No. Stay here, like we planned."

"Will you call if you need me?" Tyler asked, but he knew the answer before it left her lips.

"No," Brigitte said, "I won't. Keep the car running. You hear me scream, you count down from one hundred. If I don't come back by the time you reach one…then you have to go."

"I won't just leave you—"

"Yes," Brigitte spoke, a tiredness creeping into her voice as she stepped outside the car, the wind beginning an immediate assault on her small form. She closed the door and leaned close to the window so he could watch her mouth form her next words.

"Yes," her lips spelled out, already tinged blue with the cold, "Yes, you will."

* * *

Brigitte stood at the opposite entrance to the tunnel, braced against the wind, her gaze trained on the snow-covered landscape before her. The sun had started to rise, creating a thousand shadows for the beast to hide within, and among the silvery trees his grey pelt would blend almost inconspicuously. Brigitte's glorious golden eyes, though, caught the waxing light and bent it to her will, and she could discern every snowflake that fell before her as if it were under a microscope. Her nostrils flared. She shuffled her feet and picked out, from the machinations of Tyler's car running in the background, the approach of her pursuer. The sound of cracking branches, padded paws on the soft snow, sent shivers up her body, and as she turned her head in the direction of the noise, his monstrous form slipped from the trees and onto the road far before her. 

The creature looked no worse for having traveled hundreds of miles, part of his journey completed in the middle of a blizzard. He shook himself off, and raised his head to fix his own golden glare upon her. Clawing at the earth, he caught her scent and gave a gruesome growl that made Brigitte's jaw tighten. She shucked her coat and stood before him in her thin cotton tee-shirt, but she didn't shiver.

"You want me, you bastard?" she shouted, her words whipping towards him in the wind, "You want me—come and get me."

The wolf snapped his tail from side to side as if he were truly contemplating the decision, as if he hadn't had that very thing on his mind for the past year. Then, with a few shuffling steps, he started forward at a trot, gaining speed as he advanced.

Brigitte, taking a deep breath, took one step, then another. Then another and another until she, too, was bounding forward, bent on keeping the wolf as far away from Tyler as possible.

His strides were huge, but she met him a little more than halfway the initial distance between them. As woman and wolf launched forward, both emitting growls that could have shook the ground, far away Tyler heard them collide in midair with a crash of teeth and claws and sheer power.

She had leapt last—she had the advantage of inertia. Brigitte bowled the beast backwards onto the asphalt and rolled to her feet again, managing to tear a gash alongside his ribs. But she had met her match. She screamed unwittingly as the wolf lunged and latched onto her upper arm with his fully developed canines, but as he preoccupied himself with gnawing on her bicep, she bore the pain and swung around to stab him in the right eye.

He released her with a howl of rage, shaking his head violently as the eyeball oozed its vitreous liquid down the side of his scarred face. If she could blind the other eye, he would have to rely on scent alone to catch her.

Then she realized that she had triggered the response she had relegated to Tyler. He would have begun counting. If she did not end it quickly, he would do as he was told and leave her to her fate. _Perhaps it would be better that way_, she thought. _No complications, no confusion—just our paths splitting into two again, his looping back in the direction from whence we came, mine going…somewhere else._

_Ninety- one…Ninety…Eighty-nine…_

They circled each other on the blacktop, the wolf cocking his head at such an angle that trained his functional eye on her at all times. She licked her arm, staid the blood that had been flowing from the puncture wounds.

"That all you got?" she questioned, and on cue the wolf dug his claws into the earth and sprang forward.

_Seventy-four…seventy-three…seventy-two…_

She tried to dodge his flying form but couldn't maneuver out of the way fast enough. Knocking her backwards, he pinned her to the ground, a paw on each arm, and snapped at her face, carving sloppy canine kisses on her cheeks.

"Get…off…me," she snarled, drawing her legs up and kicking at the beast's hind-legs. But he ignored her barrage and breathed heavily in her ear.

She drew back her left leg and placed a determined kick in his groin. The wolf, leaping backwards, let out a snarl to rival her own.

_Fifty-eight…fifty-seven…fifty-six…_

She turned over, tried to scramble away on all fours, but suddenly the wolf's front feet hit her heavy on the back, slamming her into the ground.

Opening his mouth, he clamped down hard on her shoulder, and Brigitte screamed again.

_Forty…thirty-nine…thirty-eight…_

He tightened his grip, pressing her into the asphalt below. With sharp swipes he began using his hind feet to tear at the seat of her pants, his claws furrowing her lower back, her buttocks, her thighs.

She had managed to force her arms up and began tearing at the wolf's muzzle, but he just dug his teeth deeper into her flesh.

_Twenty-five…twenty-four…twenty-three…_

Brigitte worked her fingers into the wolfs mouth, tried to pry apart his jaws, but her strength was quickly fleeing her along with the blood pouring from her shoulder.

"Leave me alone," she screamed, "Leave me alone!"

But the wolf was as single-minded as she herself had suggested, and he had finally succeeded in ripping asunder her jeans.

_It's too late_, Brigitte thought, _he's already taken what you wanted. You'll never have what he had. Ever._

_Sixteen…fifteen…fourteen…_

The wolf let go, and Brigitte immediately surged forward, but he had grabbed ahold of her jeans. She struggled out of the denim, scraping her bare legs on the pavement. She heard more rending noising as she tore her feet free of the material and staggered forward. But as she struggled, he came from behind and caught her again.

_Four…Three…two…_

"No!" Brigitte cried, but she knew it was over. She thought she heard the engine rev, the tires squeal. The wolf hunched over her, the beast inside her own body waking, responding, forcing her still.

And then, through the air, a stone the size of a tennis ball came flying. It smashed into the wolf's temple with a dull thud.

_One._

"Get the fuck off my girl, you deformed, dirty son of a bitch!"

Brigitte looked up and saw Tyler standing in the tunnel entrance; his arms held cocked back, his hands wrapped around a lacrosse stick containing a rock similar to the one he had just pitched forward.

The wolf paused, raised his own head and watched Tyler.

"I said," he spat, "She's _mine_."

He slung the stick forward, and with a whir, the second rock flew. It hit the wolf in the same spot as the first, with a considerable amount of force.

The beast stepped backwards with a howl, shaking his head and Brigitte shrunk down to the ground, breathing hard.

"Run, Tyler, run!" she screamed as the wolf shook off the confusion caused by the blows to his temple. He leapt over her prone body and charged towards the man. Tyler, as if he couldn't hear Brigitte's cries, smiled, dropped his lacrosse stick.

"That's it," he said, stepping back into the shadow slowly.

Brigitte struggled to her feet, took a deep breath, and started towards the tunnel. Her gait strengthened into a sprint after a few shaky strides. As she neared the wolf he whirled and snapped at her, but she passed him without a scratch. Barreling forward, the sounds of her pursuer melded with that of an approaching vehicle. Their were trails of light on the floor of the tunnel, and then she saw Tyler in the dim glow, pressed against the stonewall, his eyes wide with terror.

She ran, pushing her body hard, the sharp wind stinging her fresh cuts and bruises. The entire tunnel was alight now, and the wolf was only a step behind her.

She trained her eyes ahead, into the light. The driver was going fast, too fast to stop in time. A man seemingly pulled directly from her past, he pulled on a cigarette and didn't see her or the thing that followed until he focused his eyes straight ahead. She watched shock steal over his face, heard as he slammed his foot on the brake.

Suddenly before her, Tyler's hand arm appeared, a flesh and bone blockade between her and her impending death.

_It doesn't look like much, _she thought, _But it's something. He's strong, or he wouldn't be standing there. It's enough._

She hit Tyler's arm and it curled around her moving form, pulling her sharply to the side as the screeching of brakes filled her mind. She hit Tyler's body with a thud, and he pressed her form into his, flattening himself against the cold stone.

She felt something tear open her shoulder and she screamed into Tyler's chest as he tried in vain to pull her closer. If they could only slip into the stone, melt away completely, but the sounds kept Brigitte in the present.

The vehicle passed in a blur, skidding, and there was a sickening medley of crunching and inhuman squeals of pain.

The truck stopped a few feet outside the tunnel, the remnants of the wolf dragged along on the underside in a jumble of malformed limbs and maligned intent.

"Shh, baby, shh," Tyler soothed, and Brigitte realized with a shudder that she was still screaming. She hushed.

"Come on," he urged, "We've got to get out of here, come on sugar."

With a deft movement, Tyler swung her up into his arms and jogged through the length of the tunnel. When they broke from the other side Brigitte turned back to see the trail off blood she had left, listened as the driver opened his door, and whispered, "Oh, fuck me," to himself in exasperated tones.

"The side mirror caught you in the shoulder, baby," Tyler said as he carefully placed her in the passenger seat. The car was still running as he slid into the driver's seat, "Should I bring you to the hospital?"

"No, no," she answered. Tyler fished in the back and produced his scrub shirt, balled it up, and pressed it to her shoulder. He pulled her other arm to hold the makeshift bandage in place. Brigitte sat, shaking, staring at her bare legs, the red silk panties she had put back on after their tryst for reasons she still couldn't comprehend.

She let him drive for ten minutes before she told him to pull over. She found her cords and stepped outside, tried to get the replacement pants on. As she struggled with one hand still applying pressure to her bleeding shoulder, she saw Tyler come around the front of the car.

"Brigitte," he began, but she shook her head.

"No, I don't need your help."

"Yes, you do," Tyler said.

"No! I told you to stay in the car, Tyler. I told you to count."

"I did count. And when I got to one, I realized that I had never been good at taking orders from anyone."

"You weren't supposed to leave the car. You were supposed to drive away. You were supposed to let me go."

"I couldn't! I couldn't let you go. I'm not going anywhere, damn it!" he shouted, grabbing her and pulling her to him, "Don't you understand? I'm not going anywhere."

He kissed her fiercely, but she fought it, breaking away.

"But there's always going to be another wolf, another near-transformation. I could hurt you, Tyler. I could become like your mother," she challenged, standing there bare-legged and bleeding. But Tyler had his hand around her beating heart, forcing it to keep going.

"Fuck Brigitte! I couldn't help her. I couldn't help her and I couldn't change what she did to me, no matter how I tried. But I can _help_ you, Brigitte. _I can. _Please, baby, let me help you."

He drew her in again, tore the cords from her grip, brought them to the ground. Then he picked up one foot, stepped it into a leg, then the did the same with the other. She tried to push him away, clawed at his back, but he didn't stop. He slid the pants up her legs, and onto her hips, his fingers carefully pushing the buttons into place.

Brigitte continued to struggle as he worked, and in the distance, she suddenly saw her sister. Ginger stood radiant as the snow sparkled around her in the morning sun, her red hair dancing in the wind.

Slowly, the shade brought her head up, then down. She was nodding.

"Ginger," whispered Brigitte, pausing in her assault, but her sister just gave a small smile, and faded away as if she had never been.

"Brigitte," said Tyler, pulling her back from the brink, "Brigitte…"

She stopped trying to fight him. She stopped trying to believe that she had to be alone, that there was no way for them to walk away from all this together.

He nuzzled her cheek, pushing her face back so each was staring into the other's eyes.

Alone, their eyes were the colors of cornflowers and marigolds, and together they melted to make a shade of green that belonged to the grass, that spoke of a summer to come.

She couldn't keep the tears from flowing. He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her weeping eyes.

"Oh Brigitte," he said, and gently pressed his lips to hers until the tears had dried, until she kissed him back with an equal portion of understanding, desire.

He led her back to the car, reluctant to release her at the passenger door, but he did.

"Go back," she said, when they were in place.

"Brigitte—"

"There's something I need to do, Tyler," she declared. Without another word, Tyler swung the car around.

As they neared the underpass he slowed the car cautiously.

"Don't worry," Brigitte said, reaching in the back, "The guy in the truck is gone, probably off to tell the story to people who won't believe him."

"I wouldn't have believed it either," he said, "If I hadn't have seen it with my own eyes."

Brigitte turned back to the front. She had the camera in her hand.

"What are you doing?" he asked, but she didn't answer. But she didn't try to stop him when he followed her out of the car and back into the tunnel, either.

The corpse was just on the other side of the opening, a bloody stain on the black top. Crows had already begun to congregate in the surrounding trees, filling the air with their raucous calls.

Regarding the mess through the lens, Brigitte let the sunlight catch the red on the snow covered ground before snapping the picture. She took another, and another, documenting every part of the death, filing away these pieces of her past with every click of the camera.

When she had finished she found Tyler standing beside her, bearing the jacket she had discarded and his lacrosse stick. She took the jacket, but eyed the stick skeptically.

"A reminder," said Tyler, reading her mind as he twirled it around, "There are some things I don't mind remembering."

She nodded.

"But what about these pictures?" he asked.

"Reminders. Of things that I can't forget."

She contemplated the corpse, then turned back to Tyler.

"You have a can of gas? And a match?"

Tyler seemed to understand. He disappeared into the dark and came back with the gasoline and the lighter from her dreams.

She let him douse the lycanthrope with the gas, inhaling the heady toxic smell as it filled the air. He crouched down, flicked open the lighter, but then he paused.

He held the device up for her to take, expectant.

"You should do the honors," Tyler said, and she took the lighter in her hands. The metal was silver, and the combination of the cool metal in her palm and the gasoline in the air made her nauseous. She bent down, moved her thumb in the familiar motion. Thoughts of cigarettes and lockets and needles filled her mind as she held the flame to the flesh, let it catch.

She stood dizzily. Tyler caught her, enfolded her in an embrace as they watched it burn.

"What about Alice?" she asked suddenly, when she had successfully cleared her mind of the memories and the smell of burning hair had overtaken her senses, "You think she's still looking for us?"

"Don't you worry about any of that," he assured her, "I'll take care of everything. I've got connections."

"But…"

"Brigitte," Tyler soothed, "Trust me."

"Alright," she said, "I trust you. But we'll need more monkshood. Wolfsbane, maybe, if we can figure out a way to grow it. I'll never…I'll never be normal, you know.""I know," sighed Tyler, "But neither will I."

He dropped his arms from around her shoulders, took one of her hands in his instead.

"So…Brigitte…" he said, watching the flames lap at the corpse, licking the bones clean, "Where do you want to go?"

He held onto her, entwining his fingers in hers as he waited for her reply.

She stared at her reflection in the blaze, her golden eyes burning as if they were a part of it. But they were a part of her, too, a part she wouldn't have to hide with him. Her shoulder hurt, but it was healing. She could feel the flesh knitting itself together, repairing the damage. She was a broken woman, but with a little work, maybe Brigitte could be repaired.

She squeezed Tyler's palm, turned her gaze to him. He took his eyes from the fire and smiled. This time, she smiled back.

"I don't care," she said, "If you're the one who takes me there, it can be anywhere."

"You are quite a woman, Brigitte," Tyler chucked softly, "I might have to pull over periodically and show you just how special you are."

"You fool," said Brigitte, still smiling, "There'll be plenty of time for that later. For now, you'd better just drive."

"Yes ma'am," said Tyler, with a wink. But as they turned to go, he held onto her hand with no intention of releasing it, releasing her. And for Brigitte, feeling Tyler's intentions—both wonderful and wicked, but full of promise—flowing through his fingers into her own, that was enough.

Brigitte and Tyler, the end of something at their backs, stepped towards something new. They weren't afraid. It was waiting for them in the black. Together, they moved into shadow. As the dark swallowed them up, the fire spat and snarled in the middle of the road, until the only things left were the dying embers and the spattered bloodstains, violent red, in the snow. In time, those, too, would disappear.

But _they_ would remember, every time she put the poison in her veins, every time he held her as it coursed through her body.

They would try, because trying was the only thing that would keep things from falling apart.

And because it was impossible to forget, they would remember.

They would remember everything.

_THE END

* * *

_

_Author's Note:_

_It's been a blast, folks. Thanks for all your support and comments as I struggled to put this beast to bed. Hope the ending was satisfactory and worth the wait. _

_Expect more GS fanfiction from me in the future, possibly more with this particular pairing, possibly other things. I'm kicking around some ideas. _

_Until then, happy writing! _

_Ash _


End file.
